exploring iranian efl teachers’ familiarity with foreign culture in terms of intercultural competence

in today’s multiculturally interconnected world, cultural understanding is the key to communication and a buffer to communication breakdown. that is, the objectives of language learning cannot be viewed as a mainly linguistic task anymore; they should be directed towards achievement of intercultural communicative competence. therefore, the foreign language teachers should utilize and promote the acquisition of intercultural competence in their learners. however, they themselves, in the first place, ought to be sufficiently familiar with the foreign cultures of the language they teach. hence, the rational of this study was to explore how familiar iranian teachers are with the foreign cultures and to what extent they are prepared for teaching intercultural competence. on the other hand, this study addresses teachers’ perceptions of their pupils’ language-and-culture learning profile as well. to do so, 120 iranian english teachers teaching in private english institutes of mashhad were asked to answer the sections 4 and 5 of a survey entitled ‘foreign language teachers and intercultural competence’ organized by lies sercu (2005). the findings revealed that teachers need additional familiarity and preparation to interculturalize their foreign language education and improve their students’ culture learning profile in terms of intercultural competence.