TEACHING MATERIALS AS MEDIATORS FOR INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

This book presents a revised version of the authors MA dissertation, originally submitted for the award of a research Master of Arts degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the English Department of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences of Sfax (FLSHS), University of Sfax, Republic of Tunisia. It explores the mediatory effects of culture-based teaching materials on the development of Intercultural Competence (IC) among higher education EFL students, using three teaching techniques: cultural awareness (CAT), critical incident (CIT), and cultural misunderstanding (CMT). The study employs a three-phase mixed methods quasi-experimental pretest posttest design, where data collected at each stage informs the next. The book outlines the identification phase, which gathered information on teachers and students views on IC in the Tunisian higher education EFL context, the implementation phase, where a course integrating culture-based materials was designed and taught, and the evaluation phase, which assessed the impact of the pedagogical intervention on students development of IC.