The effect of integrating teaching cross-cultural knowledge and teaching listening skill in tertiary education on improving EFL students' intercultural communication competence

Teaching cross-cultural knowledge in language teaching is drawing more and more attention nowadays. This study investigated the effect of integrating teaching cross-cultural issues and teaching listening skill on students’ intercultural competence. The participants were 30 Vietnamese students of English as a foreign language (EFL) who participated in the course on Listening 2 in the second year of their MBA program in Kien Giang University, Vietnam. The study consisted of an experimental study based on a pretest-posttest research design on integration of cross-cultural issues and teaching listening. The intercultural sensitivity self-assessment questionnaire (ISSAQ) that serves as a pre-test at the beginning of the semester is based on the theoretical framework put forth by Bennett and Bennett (2004). It is to elicit a self-assessment of their intercultural knowledge, behaviors and attitudes. During the ten-week intervention, besides helping students master the language and listening skill, the researcher helped promote students’ cross-cultural competence with the process-oriented intercultural teaching mode by Li (2016). At the end of the course, the posttest was given to measure the effects of the integration model on students’ intercultural communication competence. The results of the study suggested that integrating cross-cultural knowledge and language teaching could improve EFL students' intercultural communication competence (ICC).