Role of culture and intercultural competence in university language teacher training programmes

The present study aims at revealing the opinions of academics and trainee teachers at language teaching departments regarding the cultural components to be integrated into language teaching curricula. Inventory of Cultural Components (Razi, 2012) was administered to 620 students and 35 lecturers in the departments of English Language Teaching, German Language Teaching, Japanese Language Teaching, and Turkish Language Teaching at Ç anakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey. Descriptive statistics indicated higher values for such cultural components as country and means of communication in comparison to weather conditions and travel habits in terms of inclusion in language teaching curriculums. There were significant statistical differences between several categories of the scale and participants in different classes.