Exploring interculturality among English language teachers

This study aimed to explore the participant English teachers' levels in the attitudes, skills, and knowledge components of intercultural competence as well as the overall competence. Besides, the study also aimed to find out whether there is a significant difference between the participants' workplace, education level, work experience and overall intercultural competence level. For this purpose, the researcher administered a 5-point Likert-type self-report scale, Recognising Intercultural Competence, a tool developed by the Council of Europe to 52 teachers. The teachers were selected through purposive sampling. Moreover, 10 participants volunteered to go through a training in which they were provided with fourteen intercultural tasks to complete in seven weeks at regular intervals. Following this period, semi-structured interviews were implemented to have a deeper insight into their opinions regarding their opinions on interculturality in English language education as well as the training process. The researcher first collected quantitative data and next, qualitative data sequentially in two phases. Therefore, this study followed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. The quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA test, and the qualitative data was analysed through thematic content analysis. The quantitative findings revealed that the participant teachers' intercultural competence in the attitudes component is 4,31; in the skills component 4,49; in the knowledge component 4,36; and overall competence 4,39 out of 5.00. This means that the teachers fulfil the requirements of intercultural competence in each dimension, and they can act on their intercultural competence very often. Furthermore, it was found out that there is no significant difference between the participants' intercultural competence level and their workplace, level of education, or work experience. The qualitative findings revealed that the participants place great emphasis on intercultural values in English language education; however, the intercultural elements in the coursebooks were found to be insufficient and it was indicated that there is a need to train preservice teachers or novice teachers in this respect so that they can pass on their intercultural values to their students.