Interculturalizing English Language Teaching: an Attempt to Build up Intercultural Communicative Competence in English Majors through an Intercultural Course

Developing intercultural communicative competence in EFL learners is one of the most recent aspects of language competency that aims at equipping learners with appropriate attitudes and skills to be able to interact more effectively in culturally-diverse settings. The current study was an attempt to explore the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) of a group of English majors and investigate what aspects of ICC explicit teaching could improve.Thus, an intercultural course was designed and implemented through an academic semester. A questionnaire of intercultural communicative competence was administered before and at the end of the semester to find out any possible significant change in the ICC level of the participants. The study also explored if there was any correlation between language proficiency of the participants and their level of ICC. The results of the study indicated that the overall ICC level of the learners increased significantly through the intervention of the intercultural course with the most significant rise in behavioral, cognitive and affective dimensions of the construct respectively. The results showed that there was not any significant correlation between language proficiency and the overall level of intercultural communicative competence; however, regarding the components of ICC some differences were found across two groups. The results of the study have implications in teacher education programs, teaching methodology, curriculum and materials development and the assessment of the ICC construct.