The Explanatory Power of Intercultural Communicative Competence among EFL Teacher Candidates

Abstract

While intercultural communicative competence has gained considerable attention in teachers’ professional development, studies have underestimated the contributions from teacher candidates. The current study intends to explain whether demographic variables of gender, study year, bi/multilingualism, living in another city, and study abroad experience have a predictive power on intercultural communicative competence. Several multiple regressions were used to analyse 199 teacher candidates’ previous intercultural experiences and findings suggest that number of languages explained the variance in intercultural communicative competence, and compared to bilingual individuals, multilinguals had higher intercultural communicative competence. Study abroad experience and living in another city also predicted the variance. However, gender difference did not yield significant results