Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Farhad Mardaneh ¹
• Rajab Esfandiari ²
• Abbas Ali Zarei ²

¹ Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran

² Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Literature and humanities, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran

Abstract

As the world evolves into more globalized, ethnically, and linguistically mixed societies, Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) stages itself as a crucial asset. This fact holds particularly true when it comes to increasingly globalized healthcare academic milieux, where cultivating ICC is crucial for healthcare professionals to interact effectively with patients from diverse cultural backgrounds. The present study, employing a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design, explored the development of ICC among nursing, as the control group (27 participants), and medical students (32), as the experimental one through explicit ICC training at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in Zanjan, Iran. Hence, targeted ICC training effectiveness in enhancing the cultural empathy (CE), flexibility (F), social initiative (SI), open-mindedness (OM), and emotional stability (ES) of medical students was investigated employing the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) as a key tool to gauge learners' ICC before and after the training. The findings showed a significant improvement in the participants' all ICC sub-scales, indicating the positive impact of explicit training on the development of CE, F, SI, and OM.

Keywords

• intercultural communicative competence
• Multicultural Personality Questionnaire
• cultural empathy
• social initiative
• flexibility
• open-mindedness
• emotional stability

Main Subjects

• English language learning