What is Intercultural Communicative Competence in English Language Teaching? Examining the Discourse of Thai Pre-Service English Teachers

Due to globalization, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become important. To integrate ICC into the classroom, appropriate perceptions towards this construct are needed. To know and understand what these perceptions might be, this study examined pre-service English teachers’ views collected through an online open-ended survey; a total of 53 respondents completed the survey. Analysis of the data was done through a corpus approach; specifically, keywords were derived from comparison with a benchmark corpus. Subsequently, the contexts of occurrence of these keywords were analysed. This study the analysed the first five keywords, which were “we,” “language,” “different,” “culture,” and “students.” Based on the contexts of occurrence, this study found that the pre-service teachers perceived ICC as a notion that can be taught through specific pedagogical practices; that ICC is driven by differences in language and culture; and that students have the role of enhancing their ICC knowledge and skills. The findings present a contextual understanding of ICC, which may not necessarily be aligned with other cultural settings.