Assessing EFL Learners’ Intercultural Communicative Skills.

Abstract

This Master thesis paper aims at assessing intercultural communicative skills in the Algerian department of English more precisely in Tiaret. It is meant to investigate the extent to which the EFL students know about the cultural aspects of the target culture, as well as to show the importance of incorporating Foreign Language (FL) culture into EFL learning. This dissertation stands on the assumption that inter-cultural teaching /learning is somehow marginalized in comparison to the other linguistic skills of the language. In the purpose of proving the validity of this hypothesis, a study composed of an intercultural test as the leading research instrument, for first year Master students is conducted; the test was to assess learner‟s background knowledge about the target culture as well as the degree to which their intercultural communicative competence has developed based on the model presented by Byram, which includes five competencies or savoirs. The obtained results revealed that university EFL students are not very competent to interact and communicate effectively in cross-cultural encounters due to their limited knowledge about the target culture, in addition to the weakness of the existence of culture in the Algerian universities. Based on these findings, several helpful suggestions and recommendations are proposed to EFL teachers and students to be intercultural mindful speakers.