Enhancing Intercultural Competence Using Multi-Cultural Literature in Culture Classes for Pre-service English Teachers

Abstract

This article discussed the need for culture education for pre-service English teachers in an ever increasingly globalized and consequently multi-cultural world. Instruction on culture should be expanded from the gaining knowledge to the formation of attitudes and acquisition of intercultural competence. This classroom-based study aims to propose a new direction to which pre-service English teacher education should advance in terms of the intercultural communicative competence. Intercultural communicative competence has to be integrated into the curriculum for the prospective teachers. Based on Rodriguez (2013), this paper makes recommendations for the effective use of muli-cultural literature in enhancing intercultural communicative competence of pre-service English teachers. This classroom-based action research was conducted with English education major students registered for the American and British culture course in 2018. This study suggested that a culture class should rectify its direction in the cultural awareness education and proposed a teaching procedure which integrates reading multi-cultural literary texts into the intercultural communicative competence, following the sequence of decoding, text information building, and reader-model construction (Koda, 2010). In the three cycles, the students have shown that they gained knowledge about the culture, formulated the attitude, and acquired the skills. The multi-cultural literature was a good starting point to a new direction although any generalization should be made with caution.