Examining Intercultural Communicative Competence in Collectivist and Individualistic EFL Teachers

Abstract

Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) is an indispensable part of any educational setting and the need for high quality teachers is getting more crucial. Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is the capacity to understand one’s own and other cultures and to communicate effectively and appropriately with those of other cultures. Language teachers are required to have an acceptable perception of ICC. Among the personality traits, being collectivist or individualistic is under study to find the possible effect/relationship on different aspects of teachers’ performance in real classes. This study is an attempt to investigate the difference in intercultural competence between collectivist and individualistic Iranian EFL teachers. To this end, the researcher administered Mostafaei’s, Alaei’s and Nosrati’s (2018) ICC questionnaire and Singelis’ et al. (1995) collectivists individualistic questionnaire to collect data from EFL teachers. After two months of data collection, 106 teachers responded to the items of both questionnaires. The data were analyzed through running independent samples t tests to find the difference between collectivists/ individualistic groups of teachers regarding their responses to ICC questionnaire. The results revealed that there is a significant difference between these groups and collectivists teachers had a higher mean in comparison to the mean score of individualistic teachers. Moreover, the results of further analysis showed that there is no significant difference between male and female EFL teachers regarding their responses to the ICC questionnaire. The results can be beneficial for both administrators and teachers.