Intercultural Communicative Competence: Indonesian EFL Lecturers' Beliefs, Classroom Efforts, Problems, and Solutions.

Abstract

The status of English as the world lingua franca calls for the integration of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) teaching in EFL classrooms. This research reports on Indonesian EFL lecturers’ beliefs about ICC, pedagogical and technological classroom efforts to improve students’ ICC, the encountered problems, and solutions in ICC teaching integration. The study employed the explanatory sequential mixed method in which quantitative data were obtained from 122 EFL lecturers throughout Indonesia using ICCBS online survey which was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The qualitative data were then collected from observation and interviews which were analyzed using interactive model analysis. The results showed that lecturers had high-level competence and positive beliefs in integrating ICC teaching into EFL classrooms. They also had used optimum pedagogical and technological efforts to integrate ICC into their classrooms. However, problems were still encountered by both lecturers and students in relation to challenges of multicultural issues, so some solutions and ICC-related teaching activities were required. Future studies might adapt various pedagogical and technological classroom practices to bring ICC into EFL classrooms at various levels of education. In addition, a longitudinal study needs to be conducted to explore factors interplaying in ICC.