Developing English language learners’ intercultural communicative competence: monocultural vs multicultural contexts

This paper investigates the perceived intercultural communicative competence (ICC) of university students from a monocultural and a multicultural context, challenging the assumption that those from a multicultural context would have higher levels of ICC. An online intercultural learning project was designed to facilitate Hungarian and Malaysian university students’ ICC development whose intercultural competence was measured by a self-reporting instrument, adapted from Fantini (2019), at the beginning and at the end of the project. The instrument consisted of 30 statements addressing four domains of ICC: knowledge, skills, attitudes, and awareness. The findings show that although there was a statistically significant difference between learners’ ICC in the different cultural settings at the beginning of the project, both groups showed improvement in all domains of ICC and their overall perceived competence. They reported similar levels of ICC when the project concluded, with the highest improvement in the knowledge domain. The initial difference between the groups can be explained by the characteristics of the respective cultural contexts of the learners, indicating that intercultural education in monocultural settings should focus on different aspects of learning than those in multicultural ones. This has implications for the development of materials and the design of learning experiences.