A Study on the Development of Intercultural Effectiveness: Intercultural Perspective and Academic Achievement of Efl Learners

Foreign language teaching is one of the key concepts in swiftly globalized world. The recent identification of language teaching is leaning to develop intercultural communicative competence. So, international exchange opportunities may be utilized to develop intercultural communicative effectiveness, one of the components of intercultural communicative competence. Within this perspective this article use the analysis of the data from a project between Fırat University and Turkish Collaboration and Coordination Agency (TIKA) as base. The participants were the Turkish EFL (English as a foreign language) learners and the Ghanaian teacher candidates (GTC). The aim was to investigate the participants’ intercultural effectiveness development and their perceptions of the usefulness of their intercultural interactions on academic achievement in this respect. Data collected from an Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), and interviews were analyzed to address the research questions. Findings, taken from the quantitative and qualitative analysis, show that students developed their intercultural effectiveness levels and increased their academic achievement to some extent. Based on the results intercultural collaborations are discussed to provide intercultural scope and language learning facilities for students.