Major field of study and student teachers’ views on intercultural communicative competence

Abstract

ABSTRACTEffective intercultural communication depends not only on language skills, but also on the ability to apply these skills appropriately and efficiently in a variety of cross-cultural situations. The language teacher's task is to develop in their students the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will help them interact with interlocutors coming from different cultural, linguistic and national backgrounds. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the role of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and the expertise on how it should be developed in a classroom have become essential attributes of an L2 teacher. The article presents a research study whose aim was to investigate the student teachers’ perception of ICC in an L2 classroom and verify whether their opinions are influenced by their major field of study. The results were collected by means of a survey distributed among undergraduate student teachers of English from three departments at the University of Wrocław: the Department of English, the Department of German and the Department of History. The results indicate that even though the students were able to provide relatively accurate definitions of ICC, their perception of the role of culture in a language classroom was to some extent based on the traditional, knowledge-oriented approaches. Moreover, the major field of study appeared to affect the students’ approaches to developing ICC in the classroom.