Experienced and Novice EFL Teachers’ Cognition and Practices on Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Mixed-Methods Study in Iranian Context

Teachers as the backbone of education need to commit themselves to expanding their perception, sensitivity, and awareness toward intercultural communicative competence (ICC). By taking full advantages of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study examines if novice and experienced EFL teachers’ cognitions differ in ICC teaching. To this end, 153 (male and female) EFL teachers were selected through purposive sampling to take part in the quantitative phase containing a Likert scale questionnaire developed by Yang (2018). Among them, 15 teachers volunteered to participate in the qualitative phase of the study comprising an in-depth interview and 5 teachers volunteered for observation. Statistical and thematic analyses were used for the quantitative and qualitative data, respectively. The findings showed that there is no statistically significant difference between experienced and novice Iranian EFL teachers’ cognition of ICC. It was also revealed that both experienced and novice teachers had relatively high perception of ICC which impacted their practices. Possible implications are discussed in the final section.