iranian efl teachers’ beliefs about the implementation of intercultural language teaching

As a result of today’s intercultural interactions and globalized world, language teachers’ and researchers’ beliefs about intercultural language teaching (ilt) have changed over the last decade. furthermore, elt scholars have increasingly shown enthusiasm for exploring teachers’ beliefs about ilt. therefore, the present study sought to investigate iranian english language teachers’ beliefs about ilt and the way their beliefs impact language learning and teaching. in this mixed-methods research, a total of 60 teachers of english as a foreign language (efl) teaching at language institutes in iran participated. a close-ended questionnaire and online semi-structured interviews were used to scrutinize the teachers’ beliefs about ilt. the qualitative data went through the thematic content analysis procedure. using the maxqda 2020 software, the researchers assigned codes to the qualitative data. regarding the quantitative data, the calculation of the mean score of participants’ answers was done by means of the spss software. the findings of this study suggested that, according to the quantitative data, the majority of the participants held positive beliefs both about the implementation of ilt and the influences it can have on language learning. as the results of the questionnaire indicate and the findings of the semi-structured interviews clarify further, regarding the influences of ilt on language learning, the teachers maintained that practicing ilt in their classes has led to improvements in their language learners’ listening and reading comprehension ability and also the ability to speak and write more appropriately. two unexpected yet interesting findings of this investigation were the positive impacts of ilt implementation on learners’ motivation for learning a second language and the teachers’ own self-images as well as their professional identities. the discussion of these findings can be of value to the practitioners wishing to train professional language teachers, design intercultural language courses, and/or educate interculturally competent language learners.