Attitudes towards Intercultural Communicative Competence of English for Specific Purposes Students

Abstract

Research on language teaching of lingua francas like Spanish or English emphasize the need to consider cultural diversity and intercultural communication competence, as learners are more likely to interact with non-native speakers of different nationalities. In English for Specific Purposes for engineers, concepts such as intercultural teams, international meetings, geographical mobility, worldwide negotiations, and globalization are associated to the professional profiles of graduates and reveal the need to include intercultural communicative competence in their courses. This study uses inductive content analysis to identify the perceptions and attitudes of ESP students towards intercultural competence based on a corpus of self-assessment essays.