Intercultural citizenship and pre-service teacher education

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of intercultural citizenship and the significance of involving culturally sensitive issues in English language teaching and teacher education curriculum to train future global citizens. Before exploring ways to implement intercultural citizenship education from K-12 to university level, it is necessary to emphasize the need to integrate “intercultural citizenship education” into teacher education programs. In other words, English language teachers should become intercultural citizens themselves so that they can help their students to become intercultural citizens. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of training interculturally sensitive future teachers of English. In this respect, we report the findings of studies on intercultural telecollaboration projects involving cultural exchange between students in pre-/in-service teacher education programs in Turkey and abroad. We also suggest ways of increasing these intercultural citizenship courses and modules in training teachers to gain intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship skills.