Investigating the intercultural awareness (ICA) of ELL undergraduate students

The purpose of the study is to investigate the Cultural Awareness (CA) of English Language and Literature (ELL) undergraduate students. The study compares first and fourth year students' CA with a qualitative discourse analysis methodology. For data analysis the study uses an analytical framework from Baker (2011) consisting of the three categories of Basic Cultural Awareness, Advanced Cultural Awareness, and Intercultural Awareness. The data for the study consists of recorded interviews and recordings of three different intercultural language tasks. Structured interviews were conducted with 13 participants. The interviews were conducted in Turkish since the participants' mother tongue is Turkish and they could express their opinion in their mother tongue more fully. The interviews evaluate the participants' conceptual CA. Conceptual CA is concerned with the attitudes and knowledge of cultures required for successful intercultural communication, as well as the ability to articulate these attitudes and knowledge. Intercultural language tasks were conducted in English to evaluate the students' practice-oriented CA. Practice-oriented CA is concerned with the application of conceptual knowledge in real time instances of intercultural communication and is therefore more skill and behaviour oriented. The study shows the different levels of awareness that the participants showed in the interview and the speaking tasks. The epistemic stance of the students was used to evaluate the participants' certainty and uncertainty in the way that they expressed their opinions in the interviews and the tasks. To facilitate a comprehensive analysis of the data, the number of participants was limited. Findings suggest that the students have varying levels of cultural awareness, that language abilities have an influence on how students are able to express their awareness, and that in some cases awareness increases over four years of study. Keywords: Cultural Awareness, Will Baker, Discourse Analysis.