Promoting Intercultural Competence in Preservice Teacher Education through Virtual Exchange

Abstract

Intercultural competence refers to the ability to effectively communicate with people from diverse cultural backgrounds while utilizing one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes. To become a competent teacher in English, preservice teacher education students would have to be able to manage a classroom with students from different cultural backgrounds. This study explores the possibilities of promoting intercultural competence among a group of pre-service teacher education students at Dhofar University through a virtual exchange program with Tulane University. Through a curriculum intervention, the pre-service teacher education students were given the opportunity to engage in conversations virtually. Utilizing an approach of action research, the study attempted to seek the pre-service teacher education students’ perspectives on their intercultural competence in three areas namely attitude, skills, and knowledge by assessing their responses before and after the virtual exchange program. The results of the study revealed that the preservice teacher education students perceived their openness, communication skills, empathy, worldview, and self-awareness to have significantly increased after participating in the intercultural virtual exchange program. However, the virtual exchange program did not have an impact on the students’ reservation of judgment towards their peers of different cultural backgrounds.