A critical inquiry into in-service EFL teachers’ intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences

This paper examines the intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences of university EFL teachers from socially and linguistically diverse backgrounds working at English language preparatory schools in İstanbul. Adopting a mixed-methods case study design under a critical interpretivist theoretical framework, the study included both quantitative and qualitative data collected through an intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences scale and via interviews with interculturally experienced participants from Turkish, Western and Middle Eastern backgrounds. Descriptive statistical and thematic analyses revealed that the teachers had intercultural experiences mostly in their workplaces and that they developed positive attitudes toward diversity in the classroom though they were concerned about intercultural language teaching in practice due to the time constraint. The teachers highlighted some of the features that could be regarded as a part of having intercultural competence: being respectful and willing to communicate with diverse people, accepting diversity, discussing the different and unknown, and displaying humour. Their accounts of intercultural experiences were indicative of a complex, layered and overlapping view of culture influenced by several discourses, the most frequently referred ones of which were ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’. In the light of the study, we offer implications and new insights into ‘non-monocentric’ cultural threads through the eyes of language teachers as one of the key actors in classrooms, where local praxes and discourses may have more impact than national or international ones.