Iranian EFL Teachers’ Professional Self-concepts and Teaching Practices Regarding Intercultural Communicative Competence: The Case of Knowledge Dimension

In recent years, the purpose of foreign language education has been defined in terms of developing language learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC). The aim of language teaching is now preparing language learners to “engage and collaborate in a global society by discovering appropriate ways to interact with people from other cultures” (Moeller and Nugent, 2014, p.2). The assumption is that language teachers are moving in this direction and are following or advocating this new trend (Sercu, 2003). The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which Iranian EFL teachers’ professional self-concepts are in line with this new objective in language teaching and examine whether their teaching activities and practices are directed towards achieving or developing learners’ intercultural communicative competence. To this end, part of the questionnaire previously employed by Sercu (2003) was first piloted and then sent to a random sample of 60 university teachers of English language and literature in Iran. The results revealed that although English teachers had positive attitudes towards taking an intercultural approach to their teaching and were willing to incorporate intercultural activities in their teaching practices, they did not have clear ideas of the concept 0f ICC and its components and their knowledge and familiarity were just limited to traditional definitions of culture and cultural teaching. The results also revealed some differences between teachers of English Teaching (TEFL) and English Literature regarding the concept of ICC and its realizations in actual classroom practice.