Fostering EF learners’ intercultural communicative competence through the exploration of non-native cultures

Abstract

The Intercultural Language Teaching Approach has been widely recognized for fostering learners’ Intercultural Communicative Competence in foreign language classrooms. Despite its growing prominence, existing research remains strongly anchored in the native speaker paradigm, predominantly emphasizing native cultural content. This orientation reveals a critical gap, as it overlooks the implications of English functioning as an English as a Lingua Franca and limits understanding of whether engagement with non-native cultures can similarly promote intercultural development. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates the comparative effectiveness of native and non-native cultural orientations within intercultural language teaching. An experimental design was implemented through a ten-session instructional treatment involving 99 EFL learners. Data were analyzed to compare intercultural competence outcomes across instructional models. The findings indicate that intercultural language teaching significantly enhances learners’ intercultural communicative competence in comparison with communicative language teaching. Moreover, both native and non-native cultural models demonstrated comparable effectiveness. These results challenge the presumed centrality of the native speaker model and suggest greater pedagogical flexibility in intercultural language instruction.

Keywords: Communicative language teaching; English as a Lingua Franca; intercultural communicative competence; intercultural language teaching; native speaker model.