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A Study of Pre-service English Language Teachers
Abstract
Since societies develop mutual aims and different societies perpetuate developing long-term economic, social and cultural relationships with other cultural groups and the global instability continues hitting the world, developing intercultural sensitivity becomes more and more important at all levels of the education, especially for those who will teach other languages.
One of the major aspects of intercultural communication competence is intercultural sensitivity which has been gaining increasing attention in different disciplines. This paper focuses on the importance of intercultural sensitivity and shares the results of a study on the intercultural sensitivity of Turkish ELT major (English Language Teaching) pre-service teachers. For this purpose, 70 senior ELT major pre-service teachers completed an instrument comprising 5 factors with 24 items developed by Chen and Starosta (2000) for measuring intercultural sensitivity.
Keywords: Intercultural sensitivity, ELT, pre-service teachers
Introduction
Common features of virtually all definitions of culture include the notion of a group with shared system of meanings, behaviors, values, and beliefs that are passed from generation to generation. Culture is not synonymous with nationality or race. Therefore, culture is relative, learned, collective, changeable, and includes complex responsive processes (Matsumoto 1996).
Culture is "all those things that people have learned to do, believe, value, and enjoy in their history... the ideals, beliefs, skills, tools, customs, and institutions into which each member of society is born" (Sue 1981: 37).
Individuals can become enculturated in the environments they are born and their enculturation level both develop and evolve during their life time. As a result, this process ends up with viewing other cultures from the perspective of our own. Ethnocentric tendencies we build often result in psychological barriers between cultures and we start viewing cultures different from our own as less desirable and perhaps even threatening. Researchers have undertaken a number of approaches, not only to understanding ethnocentrism, but also to attempting to reduce it (Neuliep & McCroskey 1997; Lin, et.al. 2005).
As pointed out by Stafford, et al. (1997), cultural sensitivity means being aware that cultural differences and similarities exist and have strong effect on values, learning, and behavior. Cultural sensitivity starts with cognizance that there are differences between cultures and these variations are commonly mirrored in the approaches that different...