Investigating The Role and Position of Linguistic Needs, Affective Needs, And Cultural Needs in Intercultural Communication: A Mixed Methods Study [In English]

Intercultural communication is a hot topic in today’s world which focuses on the relationships among people all around the world. Finding the role of linguistic, affective, and cultural components in intercultural communication has been a big problem in foreign language situations. Thus, this study aims to investigate the role of linguistic, affective, and cultural components concurrently in Minoodasht, Iran. One hundred language teachers were selected through a convenience sampling procedure and then an Oxford placement test was run to check the homogeneity of the participants. An intercultural questionnaire also checked the intercultural communication level of teachers. In addition, 20 participants took part in the interview session willingly. To analyze the data, various quantitative and qualitative measures such as descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon signed ranks test, and inductive content analyses were run. It was found that the linguistic component is the most vital macro-need in intercultural communication and the cultural and affective components were put in second and third place. It was also revealed that the affective component acts as a mediator between linguistic and cultural components. This study can be pedagogically important for language teachers and materials developers to include intercultural topics in their teaching sessions and textbooks respectively