efl teachers culture teaching activities: do they help icc development?

The development of intercultural communicative competence (icc) as the knowledge, motivation, and skills to interact effectively and appropriately with members of different cultures (wiseman, 2002) has become an important aspiration of foreign language teaching ever since around the beginning years of new millennium and it seems to have only started to draw the attention of researchers and scholars. against such a background, the current study set out to investigate the kinds and frequency of culture teaching activities of iranian english as a foreign language (efl) teachers of intermediate, upper intermediate, and advance level courses of general english. in addition, attempt was made to explore the extent to which their teaching practices can be characterized as directed towards the efl learner's development of icc. 100 b.a., m.a., and ph.d. holding efl teachers of different levels were selected through convenience sampling from different private english language institutes of hamedan. as for the data collection instrument, a researcher made icc questionnaire was developed on the basis of sercu's (2005) icc scale, validated through expert judgment and factorial analyses, and on-line administered to the participants. the obtained questionnaire data were fed into statistical analyses the results of which indicated that describing what efl teachers had heard (or read) about the foreign country or culture, and what efl teachers found fascinating about the foreign culture(s) were the least popular culture teaching activity and asking efl learners about their experiences in the foreign country was the most popular culture teaching activity in iranian efl classrooms. furthermore, current cultural teaching practice could not be characterized as directed towards the attainment of icc. the findings of the study clearly call for a reorientation of the efl teachers in terms of the activities and tasks that are directed towards the development of iranian efl leaners’ icc.