Teachers’ Perceptions of Cultural Otherness in Sri Lanka: Bridging the Gap in ELT Interculturality

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic country where schools are segregated based on medium of instruction. However, the teachers of English are increasingly being required to work in schools where the medium of instruction is not their mother tongue and students come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Therefore, communication across cultural boundaries has become a prerequisite for their professional competence. This research is an attempt to identify whether the teachers of English trained by pre-service teacher education institutes in Sri Lanka possess this mandatory competency. The chapter reports findings from a mixed method study carried out in a College of Education in Kalutara district. Data include an attitudinal survey based on a purposive sample of 63 first- and second-year teacher trainees to ascertain their intercultural sensitivity. Findings revealed that the majority of the student teachers have negative perceptions of cultural diversity which would ultimately have a negative impact on their teaching. The present chapter suggests practical ways to overcome this challenge with a specially designed curriculum and introduces a context-based definition of intercultural competence.

1 Introduction

Out of the many benefits of education it is perceived that developing intercultural citizenship can be rated amongst the highest as it helps one to survive in a diverse world. Education can pave the way to developing solidarity in an ethnically divided society like Sri Lanka inculcating knowledge, skills and especially attitudes necessary to survive in a plural society where the majority group, Sinhalese, make up 74.9% of the population; the Tamils, who are an ethnic group, form 9.3% of the population according to the latest official statistics (Census of Housing and Population Sri Lanka, 2012). The history of the country demonstrates the continued antagonism between different ethnic groups as evidenced in the 30-year long ethnic war between Tamil militant groups and the Sri Lankan armed forces with the Sinhalese majority. Recent ethno-religious conflicts, such as the anti-Muslim riots undertaken by extreme Sinhala-Buddhist Bodhu Bala Sena groups (the Buddhist Power Force) in 2014, which were the result of a wave of Islamophobic rhetoric and violence against the Sri Lankan Muslim community, and the terrorist Easter Sunday attacks in 2019 by radicalised Muslim extremist groups (National Tawheed Jamaat), show the growing polarisation of the Sri Lankan political scene, based on racial, religious and ethno-nationalist identity politics. Thus, it has become an important need of the Sri Lankan educational system to make their citizens interculturally competent in order to establish complete peace among them.

One way of promoting peace is to educate citizens to combat prejudice and develop intercultural competence (Lynch & Lodge, 2002). English language teachers should be trained to develop in their students a sense of compassion and empathy towards cultural others (Lynch, 1992). In other words, as Lynch stated, education should

foster social literacy including the intercultural competence to relate creatively to the diversity of human cultures, to give awareness of the way in which human conflicts arise at the personal, inter-group and international level and to develop the ability to resolve conflicts creatively and justly, combat prejudice, discrimination and social injustice wherever they arise (p. 32).

Thus, this chapter discusses what intercultural competence is and how it is developed in prospective teachers of English studying in a preservice teacher education course. It describes an intervention in the form of an intercultural syllabus and proposes some pedagogical recommendations for future changes.

According to Hammer et al. (1978), intercultural competence is “the ability to think and act in interculturally appropriate ways” (p. 422). Lustig and Koester (2003) stress three key elements of intercultural competence: interpersonal and situational context; the degree of appropriateness and effectiveness of the interaction; and sufficient knowledge, motivation and action. Specifically, they emphasise that competence is dependent on “the relationships and situations within which the communication occurs” (p. 65). Thus, in its broadest sense, intercultural competence can be defined as “a complex of abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself” (Fantini, 2009, p. 12). Fantini further notes that the “effective” aspect relates to the individual’s competencies and the “appropriate” aspect to the receiver’s perception of the speaker’s competencies and states that there are four dimensions to intercultural competence: knowledge, skill, attitude, and awareness.

Hence, it is in this context that Deardorff (2004) attempts to document consensus among top intercultural scholars and academic administrators on what constitutes intercultural competence and the best ways to measure this complex construct, thus representing the first crucial step toward definition and measurement. According to her findings, intercultural competence is defined as “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 247). This is the working definition used throughout this research.

The present chapter seeks to give a clear picture of key components of intercultural competence (IC) as delineated in the relevant literature by showing their relevance in the Sri Lankan context, e.g., by promoting IC as a desirable outcome of English language teaching and learning. Specifically, it tries to understand what it means to be interculturally competent, how to develop IC in student teachers and how to identify the best ways to measure it. Therefore, the following research questions were addressed.

• 1. What are student teachers’ current perceptions of cultural diversity?

• 2. How would they respond to an intervention which would provide extensive opportunities that promote a greater understanding of intercultural issues?

• 3. Which strategies used by the researcher in curriculum implementation are most effective in enhancing prospective teachers’ intercultural competence?

Consequently, the study’s objectives are as follows, the aim being to achieve them through the proposed intervention.

• Evaluate the student teachers’ current perceptions of cultural diversity and determine whether they are more inclined towards “ethnocentrism” or “ethnorelativism” (Bennett, 1993).

• Assess how effective is the specially designed intercultural curriculum in developing the intercultural competence of pre-service teachers of English.

• Identify the most and least effective activities in the intercultural curriculum designed to enhance the student teachers’ intercultural competence; and propose a course of action accordingly.

2 Research Context

This research was carried out in a National College of Education (NCOE), one of the nineteen pre-service teacher education institutes that train teachers to be deployed in the Sri Lankan school system. The training period is of 3 years and in the third-year trainees are placed in schools for their practicums during which they work as ‘tenured’ teachers. However, the NCOE in which the research is conducted is different from other National Colleges where the medium of instruction is the mother tongue, because pre-service teachers from all three major ethnic groups study together here as the medium of instruction is English. Therefore, this has provided a unique opportunity to promote intercultural competence in Sri Lankan teacher education programs. In here, there are about four hundred residential students at any time of the year, representing all three major ethnic groups (but with a majority of Sinhala students), which necessitates the use of English as a lingua franca in such an intercultural situation. Nevertheless, it is observed that rather than developing intercultural relationships, student teachers tend to opt for more ethnolinguistic comradeship.

2.1 The Sample

The sample is composed of 63 student teachers from both first and second year of their residential course in the NCOE. The second-year group had spent more time in the institution and there was a chance of them being more interculturally competent due to their exposure to more cultural diversity. To determine the impact of cultural diversity, a first-year sample too was selected from the freshers. Two classes were selected from the 2 years purposely as they manifest the highest ethnic diversity in the college. Since the research methodology was more qualitative in nature, using purposive sampling techniques assured ample representation of different cultural groups to match the purpose of the research. The representation of ethnic groups in the sample is illustrated in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 Distribution of sample according to ethnic/religious affiliations

Table 2 Distribution of sample according to religion

When looking at Table 1, it is clear that in the second year Sinhala students formed the largest proportion with 74.19%, which is almost ¾ of the whole sample. Next came the Muslim students with 19.35% and the smallest number was the Tamils with 6.45%. The first-year student sample also consisted of more Sinhala students with 71.88% and the smallest number coming from Tamils with 9.38% while the Muslim participants represented 18.75%.

When the religious representation was considered, it was noticed that the sample consisted of major religious groups in the country (i.e., Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Roman Catholics). However, there were lesser numbers of student teachers from other religions when compared with majority group, the Buddhists (see Table 2).

The majority of both 1st and 2nd year student teachers were Buddhists (i.e., 64.52% and 65.63%, respectively). They were followed by the Muslims, with 19.35% in the second year and 18.75% in the first year. Roman Catholics represented 9.68% in the second year and 9.38% in the first year. The least represented were the Hindus, who were 6.45% in the second year and 6.25 in the first year. The first cycle of the research was implemented with the second-year teacher trainees and the second cycle was implemented with the first-year teacher trainees. The intervention was carried out over a period of 3 months for the first cycle and 6 months for the second cycle respectively, with 8 hours of contact lessons per week for each class.

2.2 Research Design

This study is aiming at changing a situation as well as studying a phenomenon. Therefore, it is a sort of action research. Action inquiry was chosen for several reasons. First, action research seeks not only to understand and interpret the world but to change it (Cohen et al., 2007; McNiff & Whitehead, 2006) and as such it clearly suited this study’s purpose of using education for social change. Second, it is expected that all involved educational stakeholders would benefit from such an endeavour in their actual context of practice by developing the required knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours during the process. Furthermore, a main difference between action inquiry and other research paradigms is that “knowing becomes a holistic practice and that theory is lived in practice and practice becomes a living theory” (McNiff & Whitehead, 2000, p. 35). Traditionally, the difference between theory and practice is exaggerated in that research is supposed to give priority to knowing through thinking whereas application is knowing through doing. However, such demarcation is viewed as obsolescent because both fields complement each other (Darder et al., 2003). Both theoretical and action research paradigms require rigour and objectivity. Social reality is characteristically ‘subjective’ and discursively constructed, especially in the field of education because education is always a value laden activity.

2.3 Mixed Method Approach

A classroom-based research study was conducted with 63 student teacher participants, using both quantitative and qualitative methods in the data collection and data analysis. According to intercultural scholars, the best way to assess intercultural competence is through a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures (Deardorff, 2006, p. 250). In action research everything that happens in the setting could be described and used as data, and could be interpreted to understand behaviour. Therefore, the following data collection methods were used in this research: attitudinal scale, observation, reflective journals, student diaries and field notes.

2.4 Attitudinal

The attitudinal scale was used as it provided the opportunity to collect information on attitudes and perceptions of a large number of student trainees in the shortest possible time. It consisted of sixty statements spread on the intercultural competence continuum specified by Bennett (1993) which has six stages basically divided into ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘ethnorelative’ orientations. There are three ethnocentric stages (i.e., “denial,” “defence” and “minimization”) and three ethnorelative stages, namely “acceptance”, “adaptation” and “integration” (Bennett, 1993, p. 46). The sixty statements were designed in such a manner that they fell into one of the six stages, and they were equally distributed into a set of thirty statements for each of the two phases. The Likert attitudinal scale was adapted, based on five ratings from strongly agree to strongly disagree on sixty items. Half of the attitudinal statements were ethnocentric statements, and the other half were ethnorelative. The marks were given in such a way that the respondent needed to acquire more than 35 marks to be rated, for example, on the ethnorelative continuum.

2.5 Observation

Observation was used as a tool to understand the nature of changes that occur in the participants. It was utilised as a method of enriching or supplementing the data gathered by other methods. Therefore, a colleague teaching the same subject was used as a non-participant observer and her field notes were analysed and compared with those of the researcher in order to find answers to the research questions. There was a checklist too used for logging the observations. The observation checklist was designed based on the pyramid model (Deardorff, 2006) and five factor model (Byram, 1997). The checklist was divided into three different components (i.e., knowledge, skills and attitudes) and a rubric system was devised to quantify the observed behaviours and thereby to allocate a total mark for each student for each lesson.

2.6 Student Diaries, Observer Field Notes and Researcher’s Reflective Journal

Narrative accounts play an important role in classroom-based qualitative approaches, and therefore one of the main data sources was the reflective journal maintained by the researcher. All observations related to “what happened in the classroom” were documented in this journal together with the thoughts and personal reflections of the researcher. Journal entries were basically divided into three categories and logged under three columns: (a) what actually happened in the class, (b) what the researcher thought about what happened and (c) what she learnt from what happened. Student teachers were also instructed to keep a diary during and after the class to document their reflections about the class activities. The non-participant observer too maintained a field notebook and both of these were divided into columns, same as the reflective journal of the researcher for the purposes of comparing and contrasting the observations entered.

2.7 Intervention

The intervention was done in the form of a curriculum specially designed with intercultural material. The first cycle of action was conducted with the sample from the second years. Based on the feedback from it, a second cycle was conducted with the first-year students. The intercultural materials aimed at teaching students English language skills from an intercultural perspective. English language skills are taught for 8 hours a week for both first and second years in the 2-year training period. However, this special intercultural syllabus was followed for 3 months with the second-year trainees and 6 months with the first-year trainees. The period consists of sixty-hour contact sessions with the second-year students and 100 hours with the first years. The rationale of the course was to improve the four skills of English (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing).

Although there is a set syllabus for English with specified competencies and lists of topics, no detailed content is prescribed such as a particular textbook or a course of lessons. Thus, this ‘gap’ provided an opportunity to design the researcher’s own materials referred to as the “Intercultural Syllabus”. These intercultural materials were carefully selected to develop student trainees’ attitudes, knowledge, skills, and critical cultural awareness necessary to improve intercultural interactions, taking the findings from the literature review into consideration. Since the target of the activities was to increase the critical cultural awareness and sensitivity to otherness of the student teachers while improving their English language skills, the content of the activities was on social and cultural information that promotes reflections on intercultural issues. The ultimate goal was to help student teachers to establish successful interactions with people from other cultures using English. There was a pre- and post-discussion session for each activity to develop participants’ critical thinking. The details of some activities are given in Table 3 to illustrate the nature of the intervention activities.

Table 3 Sample activities

3 Data Analysis

The data of this study are presented based on two categories. One is quantitative data and the other is qualitative data. The quantitative data were collected from the questionnaire and the checklist. The qualitative data were collected from the reflective journal of the researcher, field notes of the non-participant observer and diaries of the students. These data were analysed in such a manner that they answer the primary concerns of this research i.e., to understand the cultural perceptions of the student teacher participants at the beginning and the end of the intervention and how they have responded to the intercultural syllabus. It also allowed the researcher to understand better strategies and material that were more effective in developing intercultural competence of the student teachers. How the data are analysed is described under each data collection tool as follows.

3.1 The Analysis of Data from the Attitudinal Scale

The attitudinal scale of cultural perceptions based on Bennett’s (1993) Intercultural Sensitivity Development Model that was used to understand whether student teachers’ cultural perceptions were more inclined towards ethnocentric or ethnorelative attitudes was analysed by giving an appropriate mark based on its stage and these scores are analysed in Table 4.The real identity of the student participants is concealed by pseudonym i.e., using typical names representing their ethnicities in this Table and on all such occasions.

Table 4 Scores of the attitudinal scale

3.2 Findings of the Attitudinal Scale

When discussing the scores obtained by the second-year participants, it was observed that the highest and the lowest scores i.e., 53 and 6 were obtained by Sinhala Buddhist student teachers. Conversely, the highest score obtained by a Tamil student is 37 while the highest score obtained by a Muslim student was 35 and the lowest was 6. The three Sinhala Roman Catholics had scores of 11, 9 and 6, respectively. The mean score of the total sample was 16.93, which is only the half of the required score. The mean score of the Tamils was 33.5 and the Muslims was 21.4. The Sinhala Roman Catholics had a mean score of 10 whereas Sinhala Buddhists had a mean score of 15.52. Accordingly, the Tamils had the highest mean score, and the Roman Catholic Sinhalese had the lowest mean score. The highest number of student scores lay in the range of 31–40 which is 35.5% of the total population. The mode of the score was 33.

In relation to First Year sample’s score the highest mark obtained was 38 and the lowest was 5. Both were obtained by Sinhala Buddhist students. The highest score of Muslims was 44 and the lowest was 08. The highest score of Tamils was 33. The highest score of Roman Catholics was 29 and the lowest was 19. The mean score of the Sinhala Buddhists was 19.18. The mean score of Tamils was 33 and of the Muslims 29.5. The mean score of Sinhala Roman Catholics was 25. The highest number of scores lay in the range of 21–30 which consisted of 31.25% of the population. The mode of the score was 29. The range of scores of the total sample, and the mean score of each ethnic group are presented in Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Mean score of the sample

Table 6 Mean score based on ethno-religious identity

The highest percentage of student scores (19.35%) of the second years lay in the range of 11–20 and 40.63% of the first-year student scores lay in the range of 21–30, just at the margin of gaining intercultural competence. The lowest percentage, 6.45% of the second years, lay between 0–10 and 6.25% scores of first years were between 41–50. None of the students from any batch scored marks above 60. When the mean scores were analysed based on the ethnicity the result was as shown in Table 6.

From the second-year batch the highest mean score 33 was achieved by Tamils and from the first years the highest mean score 29 was achieved by Muslims. Thus, the tables exemplified the fact that the majority Sinhala Buddhists are more inclined towards ethnocentrism. Table 7 displays how far the mean score of each ethnic group deviated from the expected score.

Table 7 Deviation of scores from the mean

When focused on how far the mean score of each ethnic/religious group deviated from the original it is clear that Muslims have the highest positive deviation whereas the Roman Catholic Sinhalese have the highest negative deviation. Thus, the findings from the attitudinal scale show that the cultural perceptions of both first- and second-year students are more inclined towards ethnocentrism which means they believe their culture is superior to others at the beginning of the intervention. However, when the same attitudinal scale was implemented at the end of the intervention, the picture changed. This is clearly evident in Table 8 where both the marks students scored at the beginning of the intervention and at the end of the intervention are compared side by side.

Table 8 Marks of the attitudinal scale before and after intervention

When the scores of the first-year students taken before the intervention are compared with the ones taken after the intervention, it can be seen that out of the 32 participants only two have not increased their scores and one student has stayed at the same score. If this is taken as a percentage, 90.63% of the student teachers can be said to have improved their scores after being subjected to intercultural sensitivity training. Those who have scored more than 35 can be considered as in the ethnorelative phase of intercultural competence. Thus, 17 people have scored more than 35 after the intervention which is an average of 53.13%. None of the participants of the second year sample have gone down in their scores after the intervention and they all have improved their scores generally at a 100% success rate. 19 participants have scored more than 35, an average of 59.38. Hence, when considering the numbers of the sample, the intercultural learning seemed to be successful. However, many other strategies described below were used to corroborate the findings.

4 Analysis of Student Diaries, Observer Field Notes and Researcher’s Reflective Journal

As mentioned earlier the data from classroom proceedings were logged on using three strategies, namely student diaries, field notes of the non-participant observer and the researcher’s reflective journal. Although student diaries did not feature entries related to observation, they were used to access direct responses of students to the intercultural syllabus as well as their cultural perceptions. The entries in the student diaries also enabled the researcher to access personal thoughts, feelings and opinions of the participants which she could not have done otherwise. Besides, the key objective of maintaining the reflective journal was to reflect on the researcher’s practice and class activities. The data collected from these three sources were interpreted using the content analysis method. While analysing student diaries, emergent categories were identified. For example, student notes revealed different variables, such as the content relevant to student knowledge about other cultures, their skills to interact with people from other cultures, their attitudes towards the culturally different others and their critical awareness about intercultural issues. Thus, the researcher followed an ‘emerged coding’ method after initial analysis of data. Nevertheless, her coding and categorisation were greatly influenced by the theories of intercultural competence discussed in the literature review. Thus, the student diaries were read several times in order to identify perceptions and group them into categories to work out patterns and decode meaning. It was considered necessary that groups of words which give the sense of similar meaning or undertone were in the same categories and if similar words were used, they too were interpreted as connected to the same ideas and concepts. Tables based on these categories were drawn up, findings were analysed, and conclusions were drawn based on the major themes.

From these data the researcher wanted to find answers for the research questions; particularly the focus was on finding out whether the student teachers responded positively to the activities in the specially designed curriculum and changed their ethnocentric cultural perceptions over the time of the intervention. The researcher was also interested in understanding what types of activities were more/less effective in developing intercultural competence of the student teachers. Therefore, when finding categories of similar ideas, the focus was also on gathering up statements related to the obtained categories. For the purposes of triangulation, the researcher’s reflective journal entries and non-participant observer’s field notes based on the same activity were analysed simultaneously to work out patterns and connections between and among them.

The reflective journal helped the researcher to reflect on what happened in the class and also acted as an aid to memory. To analyse the entries of the reflective journal the content analysis method was used. After reading the entries several times, themes were developed on which the analysis was based. The focus of these themes was on finding out the cultural perceptions of the prospective teacher participants, and thus the same categorisations related to student diaries were used in analysing both the reflective journal entries and entries in the field notes of the observer. As mentioned earlier, the field notes and reflective journal entries were divided into three segments as follows: (a) what I did, (b) what happened, and (c) what I think about what happened.

In the data analysis, extensive attention was paid to the last two segments since they gave better insight into answering the research questions. When maintaining the student diaries, the students were instructed to invent a name representing their cultural identity and stick to it to preserve their anonymity; these were the names used throughout.

What was found in the student diaries related to the activities logged in Table 9. When similar ideas/phrases/words were found, the names of all of those students were mentioned against the comment. Since they take lots of space, only an excerpt of the first activity is included here as a sample to give a brief idea.

Table 9 Analysis of attitudes towards greetings and intercultural information exchange

5 Findings of Student Diaries, Observer Field Notes and Researcher’s Reflective Journal

The comments in all three rows of the Student Diaries section of Table 9 show that the students were very reluctant to use a greeting from another culture, which clearly illustrated their ethnocentric attitudes. However, they also gave evidence as to the keenness of students to learn about other cultures which happened as a result of the promotion of intercultural competence in the intercultural curriculum. When comparing the entries in the student diaries, field notes and reflective journal it can be concluded that student teachers had very ‘culture centred’ opinions and most of them believed their culture was superior to other cultures at the beginning of the intervention. Also, students who belonged to minority groups were much more culture conscious than students coming from the majority group. However, they responded positively to the activities in the intercultural curriculum, and it was obvious they improved their knowledge about each other’s cultures, developed skills required to handle intercultural encounters effectively and changed their negative attitudes towards culturally different others during the course of the intervention to a significant extent.

The Observation Field Notes were maintained by the non-participant observer during the activities. Through the checklist the observer tried to quantify intercultural competence by allocating a designation for different IC components. Thus, a rating system was given to each component as follows: Inadequate – 1; minimal – 2; moderate – 3; extensive – 4. For each of the activities discussed above, the checklist was used for observation, and students’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills were given a score. In some instances, some of the students were not actively participating in the lesson. In such circumstances it was difficult for the observer to quantify their intercultural competence. Thus, no marks were given. After each lesson the marks of the individuals were totalled up and their progress recorded. The mean scores obtained by these students are included in Fig. 1. A slight increase in marks in the activities towards the end was obvious in most cases. Only a few students did not show an evident change. However, when considering the mean score, it is obvious that progress has taken place. This shows that students’ intercultural awareness has improved in all three aspects of knowledge.

Fig. 1

Mean of the marks of the sample for each activity

In relation to the Researcher’s Reflective Journal, serious issues emerged that may reflect the political discord in Sri Lanka. Students were ethnocentric enough to view with distaste greetings from another culture and were reluctant to take the role of the Other by using such greetings themselves. This is not altogether surprising, especially as people from different cultures might have been opponents in the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese (1983–2009). Language was an issue that contributed to that war. In 1956, a “Sinhala Only Act” was passed which replaced English as the official language. The Tamil-minority population found this unfair because it impeded their recruitment to public service, and was discriminatory in linguistic, cultural and economic terms. The ethno-relative stage of the current research showed some willingness of participants to reach out and learn about each other’s cultures. As such, it can be regarded as a success for the intervention.

6 Conclusion:(Re)defining ‘Intercultural Competence’

The findings helped in concluding that at the beginning of the intervention the participants were more inclined towards ethnocentrism. All data collection tools indicated that the major reason for this is the negative picture they had of their cultural counterparts because of lack of knowledge about other cultures. With every activity in the intervention the participants were given the opportunity to reflect on their preconceived ideas and critically analyse them during the pre-discussion stage. Then, they were in a position to unlearn their biased preconceptions about other cultures. With the passing of time, they learnt to listen and respect cultural difference, critically analyse intercultural issues, and show empathy towards cultural others. This ethnorelative stage of intercultural sensitivity development can be illustrated by using the following cycle (see Fig. 2). Thus, the development of intercultural competence is a lifelong process in which you acquire knowledge, form skills, transform attitudes and increase cultural awareness.

Fig. 2

Intercultural competence as a cyclic process

The present study explored how Sri Lankan student teachers perceive “intercultural competence” (IC) by inviting them to give their own definitions before and after the training intervention. The student teachers’ understanding of IC improved along the road. The analysis showed that there are three common phrases found in the majority of the students’ definitions of the concept of IC, in relation to (a) knowledge about other cultures, (b) the ability to communicate across cultural differences, and (c) tolerance of cultural difference. Based on the findings of the current study, a context-based definition of intercultural competence would read as follows: “Intercultural competence means the acquisition of knowledge, formation of real-life skills and the transformation of attitudes necessary to communicate across cultural boundaries with minimum conflict” (Tennekoon, 2021, p. 148).

Thus, this study has contributed in identifying a context-based definition for intercultural competence from a non-Eurocentric perspective. It also sheds a significant light on the English Language Teaching in Sri Lanka by illuminating the importance of Intercultural Competence in making English a true lingua franca among different cultures in Sri Lankan multiethnic society.

It is obvious that English Language Learning in Sri Lanka has neglected the intercultural dimensions of English language learning, making learners inadequately prepared for challenges in their real-life language use which is more of a communication tool than a linguistic tool. Thus, it is high time we include intercultural aspects within language learning programs in Sri Lanka. In addition, English language teacher training programs in the country have not paid much attention to the challenges encountered by English language teachers as they are constantly required to cope with culturally and linguistically diverse students in their language classrooms. Therefore, English language teacher educators should be prepared to address intercultural competence both theoretically and practically in their teacher training courses through curriculum, syllabi and pedagogic revisions. Moreover, the notion of reaching native speaker competence must be replaced with the model of intercultural speaker, which fosters the ability to relate to other cultures in a way that helps in realising the goals of English as a link language. Intercultural learning should be made an integral part of foreign language education, and not some peripheral component. This is necessary to reach intercultural communicative competence in addition to linguistic or lexical competence.