An investigation of intercultural sensitivity level of higher education students in three countries

Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on intercultural sensitivity in all fields of education. The objective of this study is to investigate intercultural sensitivity level of higher education students in different countries namely Turkey, Russia and Iraq and the effect of various factors such as personal information, communicating with people from other cultures and previous overseas experiences. In accordance with the purpose of the study, the participants consist of 317 higher education students who were studying English language related departments from different universities in Turkey, Russia and Iraq. The data of the study was gathered by the researcher through a questionnaire which was composed of two parts: multiple-choice questions to gather demographic information about the participants and an intercultural sensitivity scale. The data obtained from the research were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program. Statistical tests such as arithmetic mean, standard deviation, frequency, t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze the data. As the study includes participants from three countries and different variables, according to the findings almost in all the variables such as gender, having friends from different racial ethnical background, having native English speaker teacher, communicating through internet and tools to communicate, participating different cultural activities and also living and visiting other countries significant differences were found either one country or more in terms of total results and factors of intercultural sensitivity scale. The study contributes the existing literature by investigating all these variables which may have an impact on intercultural sensitivity level of students. Finally, the study presents some pedagogical implications for institutions, administrators, educators, families and especially individuals, who are dealing with foreign language teaching and learning, that they can benefit from and revise their perspectives on cultural issues.