A comparative study on students' intercultural communicative competence at state and private universities

The primary purpose of this thesis for Master of Art in English Language Education was to elicit ELT (English Language Teaching) students' intercultural cultural communicative competence (ICC) in wide-angle. First of all, the purpose aspired to investigate the ELT students' overall degree of ICC on the whole by comparing the state and private university students' perception towards ICC. Then the study proceeded to research the differences of ELT students' perception towards ICC in terms of their gender, native language, university type, and their overseas experience. Finally, it aimed to examine the difference of students' perception towards ICC concerning their age, language proficiency, learning English experiences, and their present grade at universities. A total of 232 participants took part in this study, which was namely from state and private universities in Turkey. Participants who have been exposed to the English language or English culture were selected in order to strengthen the objectivity of the study. An ICC Questionnaire (Wang,2016) was implemented, which consisted of 5 factors with the total of 15 question items that represent "Interaction Engagement," "Respect for Other Cultures," "Interaction Confidence," "Interaction Enjoyment," and "Interaction Attentiveness." As the measurement tool, SPSS 24. Version was performed to reach the findings and results of the study statistically. Findings demonstrated that the overall degree of ICC of all participants was found highly significant. The study reveals that state university participants' ICC is higher than the participants of private universities. Male participants indicated the significantly higher ICC than those of female participants. It also suggests that participants having overseas experience obtained considerable higher ICC than those without being abroad experience. Age, proficiency, and grade showed a statistically meaningful difference in state universities, whereas proficiencies and grade revealed a statistical difference among participants from private universities.