A Study on the Intercultural Competence of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Training Teachers

Abstract

This contribution shows a study on the intercultural competence of students of the degree in primary education at the University of Murcia, Spain. The importance of the culture associated with the learning of a language will be stated as the main idea, while the training process of future educators will be analysed so as to find out whether it is adequate. By means of an exploratory-descriptive research design, the authors worked with students from different courses (a decade apart) in order to compare their behaviour in terms of communicative and intercultural competence. Using a measuring instrument based on responses to seven case studies, data were extracted which led to conclusions that show that, although there are some differences between the two groups studied, there are still some gaps in the cultural knowledge of a foreign language and grammatical problems arising from a classroom approach that is far removed from the communicative-functional one.