The Relationship between EFL Teachers’ Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and their Students’ Pragmatic Knowledge: A Case of Common English Speech Acts

Foreign Language (L2) teachers’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and their awareness and understanding of the intercultural similarities and differences is the key to their professional success. One of the indispensable components of communicative competence, which is highly influenced by L2 teachers’ ICC and its impact on the classroom practices is considerable, is pragmatic knowledge of the L2 learners. Accordingly, the current investigation has sought to explore the relationship between L2 teachers’ intercultural competence and their students’ knowledge of common English speech acts. Participants were 85 EFL teachers and 610 upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency-level students. The participants had been studying English at language institutes from 3 to 5 years and they had almost completed American File conversation book series. These participants were selected based on the results of a Michigan Language Proficiency Test. First, the teachers filled out Jaou’s (2011) ICC questionnaire. Then, Tajeddin and Malmir’s (2015) multiple-choice test of frequent English speech acts was administered to the students. Data analysis using multiple regression revealed that all four components of teachers’ ICC were significant predictors of their students’ speech-act knowledge. Intercultural skills were the strongest predictor followed by intercultural knowledge as a mediocre predictor. However, intercultural attitudes and awareness were poor predictors of speech-act knowledge. These findings imply that L2 teachers can enhance their learners’ pragmatic knowledge regarding common speech acts by increasing their own intercultural communicative competence.