icc conceptualization from iranian efl teachers and learners’ perspectives

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a paradigm shift in second or foreign language teaching, and communicative language teaching (clt) method replaced both the traditional and designers’ methods. however, the same clt methods did not withstand the rapidly developing demands of the era of international communications, and intercultural communicative competence (icc) began to emerge from the heart of clt. from the perspective of icc proponents, foreign language learners are expected to be able to handle intercultural international contacts, and such unfamiliar situations require skills and knowledge bases far more than a good language proficiency in the given foreign language. for the language learners to be able to develop such skills and knowledge bases, their foreign language teachers need to first believe in the significance of icc in both theory and practice. given the significance of the teachers' beliefs as the bases of their teaching practices, and the crucial role that the teachers’ knowledge of both home and foreign cultures plays in facilitating successful intercultural communication among english as foreign language (efl) learners, this study aimed to investigate the efl learners and teachers’ conceptualization of icc. for this purpose, a mixed method research design was adopted, and for data collection purposes, icc belief scale and intercultural sensitivity scale were administered to 179 iranian efl teachers and 120 efl learners. an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the results. cronbach's alpha coefficient measured in this study indicated that the scales provided a high level of reliability, α= .803 and .868 respectively. furthermore, around 10 percent of the teachers were given a structured interview. the obtained results indicated that while the majority of efl teachers favored integrating icc into their praxis in theory, they were unable to do so in real practice. moreover, it was found that there is a positive correlation between efl learners’ years of language learning experience and their intercultural sensitivity, which is an indicator of their icc. the findings of this study can be helpful to the ones related to language education and those who believe in the significance of intercultural competence through language education.