A Study of Pre-service ELT Teachers’ Cultural Intelligence and its Relationship with Metacognitive, Cognitive, Motivational, and Behavioral Cultural Intelligence

Creative Commons License

Karatepe Ç., Wujiabudula1 A.

European Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies, vol.3, no.1, pp.72-90, 2020 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)

Abstract

http://www.oapub.org/lit


This study aimed to examine different aspects of ELT teachers’ cultural intelligence,

namely: “meta-cognitive”, “cognitive”, “motivational” and “behavioral” cultural

intelligence. To this end, the current study aspired to examine a group of pre-service

English teachers to measure their cultural intelligence. It also aimed to research the

student teachers' cultural intelligence in terms of their gender, age, native tongue, their

experience of traveling abroad, English proficiency, years of learning English, and finally,

their grades. A total of 148 participants from various English language teaching

departments participated in this study. A questionnaire was used to elicit the student

teachers' cultural intelligence. The SPSS 24 software program was used to perform

statistical analysis, and specifically, factor analysis, the tests of reliability and normality,

correlation analysis, and non-parametric tests were conducted to determine and analyze

the statistical results of this study. The findings suggested that, first of all, all student

English teachers' overall degree of cultural intelligence was considerably higher than that

of the average person (in Turkey). However, the student English teachers' cultural

intelligence showed a statistically significant difference which related to their overseas

experience, and to their proficiency in English. Moreover, the participants’ metacognitive

intelligence showed statistical differences in terms of their age. However,

cognitive, motivational, and behavioral intelligence and cultural intelligence showed no

statistical difference due to age. As for the participants' proficiency, it was determined

that metacognitive, motivational, behavioral, and cultural intelligence revealed

statistically significant differences, whereas cognitive intelligence showed no statistically

significant difference. The findings were discussed and implications for the future

research were given along with limitations found in the study.