A STUDY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERCULTURAL EFFECTİVENESS: INTERCULTURAL PERSPECTİVE AND ACADEMİC ACHİEVEMENT OF EFL LEARNERS

Abstract

Foreign language teaching is one of the key concepts in swiftly globalized world. The recent identificationof language teaching is leaning to develop intercultural communicative competence. So, international exchangeopportunities may be utilized to develop intercultural communicative effectiveness, one of the components ofintercultural communicative competence. Within this perspective this article use the analysis of the data froma project between Fırat University and Turkish Collaboration and Coordination Agency (TIKA) as base. Theparticipants 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 theirperceptions of the usefulness of their intercultural interactions on academic achievement in this respect. Datacollected from an Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), and interviews were analyzed to address the researchquestions. Findings, taken from the quantitative and qualitative analysis, show that students developed theirintercultural effectiveness levels and increased their academic achievement to some extent. Based on the resultsintercultural collaborations are discussed to provide intercultural scope and language learning facilities forstudents.