Innovation in Language Learning

The importance of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has found considerable resonance in the last decades.  A good knowledge of grammar rules, a rich vocabulary, a few memorized speech acts and cultural facts are not sufficient to help nonnative speakers of a foreign language to socialize or negotiate in the foreign language.  Thus, in today’s world foreign language learning cannot be directed toward the attainment of communicative competences anymore and it has to be viewed within an intercultural perspective. Classroom environments where intercultural relationships are built can only be achieved if language teachers need to be equipped with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes as well as the tools that enable them to teach intercultural competence.  

In the Turkish context the number of studies on intercultural communicative competence is highly limited. Thus the present study aims to find out  the perceptions of Turkish pre-service  (PTs) of English on integrating intercultural communicative competence in EFL classroom. PTs were asked to integrate ICC into their teaching using technology; through the 10 week study, PTs were worked in close contact with the university supervisors and mentors. 9 PTs enrolled in the Department of English Language Teaching (ELT) at a private university in Istanbul, Turkey participated and data came from a scale adapted from Sercu et al. (2005),  classroom observations and student teachers’ reflections.  Findings of the study will be discussed with a focus on implications for pre- and inservice language teacher education.