Research Note: VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR INTERCULTURAL SENSITIVITY?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This mixed-method study seeks to understand Vietnamese higher education students’ intercultural sensitivity (IS) to progress their development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), as part of the efforts to enrich the literature on IS and ICC in the Vietnamese contexts of foreign language education. Firstly, attending to these target students’ English language learning, this study quantitatively suggested that they had weak-to-moderate levels of IS and initially proved that they were still able to interact interculturally in a relatively confident way. Moreover, based on the framework of Chen and Starosta, the quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrated that the IS levels seemed to vary among the target students, according to their demographic backgrounds (e.g. gender, academic major, language as a medium of instruction, locations of hometown, year of learning, and length of English language learning). Finally, implications are discussed at the end of this manuscript, involving much attention needed from a wide range of related stakeholders in order to necessarily establish critical steps for the facilitation of intercultural education in the Vietnamese context of higher education in general and language education in particular.