Promoting intercultural competence of teacher trainees in english language teaching departments via web 2.0 tools: A case study

This study aims at finding out whether Twitter is effective in promoting intercultural communicative competence of teacher trainees with the help of Twitter. The study involves five main chapters. The first chapter includes the problem, the aim of the study, the importance of the study, assumptions, limitations, and definitions. In the second chapter, the review of literature is involved. In the review of literature part, there are subheadings about intercultural communicative competence, culture, information and communication technologies, web 2.0, social networking, and Twitter. The third chapter comprises the methodology of the study involving research design, sample and population, data collection tools, and data analysis. The forth chapter includes findings and discussion of data. The fifth chapter involves summary of the study, and pedagogical implications and suggestions. The sample group of the study includes 4th grade teacher trainees studying at Gazi University, English Language Teaching Program (N=21). The study was carried out in the 2012-2013 spring semester and the process took six weeks. Using a qualitative method, an interview and reports have been designed, and they were presented to the experts. The interview and reports were analyzed by content analysis. The analysis of the interview and reports revealed that teacher trainees considerably promoted their intercultural communicative competence in terms of knowledge and attitudes with the help of Twitter. Therefore, it was concluded that Twitter is effective in developing intercultural communicative competence of students regarding knowledge and attitudes dimension.