"ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS’ BELIEFS ABOUT INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AT A UNIVERSITY IN THE MEKONG DELTA, VIETNAM"

Abstract

"Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has nowadays become an indispensable goal of English language education in the globally interconnected world. This mixed methods study investigated intercultural communicative competence-related beliefs and self-efficacy among 122 fourth-year English majors at a university in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The findings were captured through quantitative questionnaires and further supported by a qualitative triangulation through semi-structured interviews with six participants. The results from the survey showed that their beliefs about ICC were overall quite positive: awareness was the strongest (M = 4.26), followed by attitude (M = 4.17) and skills (M = 3.94), while knowledge (M = 3.65) and self-efficacy in ICC (M = 3.54) reached distinctly lower means. Qualitative findings complemented and extended these survey results, revealing that students perceived ICC essentially as a practical, adaptive competence rather than as knowledge about culture, and it was substantially influenced by linguistic anxiety, which often overshadowed their strong cultural awareness despite limited real-life exposure. Participants actively used strategies they had developed themselves, such as counter-questioning and observation based adaptation. They also claimed to feel a strong sense of “national representation” in intercultural encounters. These results lead to a distinctive ‘language-anxiety eclipsing-culture’ phenomenon in Vietnamese EFL settings, which extends Bandura's concept of self-efficacy. The study suggests that English curricula should integrate systematic experiential and interactive activities (e.g., virtual exchanges, role-plays addressing both linguistic and cultural confidence) to bridge the theory-practice gap and enhance self-efficacy. Future research should investigate longitudinal effects of such interventions across different regions and cohorts in Vietnam."