ABSTRAK
The present research focused on probing into pre-service English teachers’ attitude towards intercultural language learning (ILL), the factors influencing their attitude, and analyzing their English teaching practice in the perspective of ILL principles.
An instrumental case study was employed to reveal the data oriented to the aforementioned focuses. Six pre-service English teachers taking English education major in Universitas Sebelas Maret were purposively engaged as the subjects. Interview, questionnaire, and observation were exerted to garner the data which were further analyzed by using the interactive model of data analysis. During soliciting up to reporting the data, a range of strategies to pursue the data credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability were also applied.
The results indicated that all pre-service English teachers had a positive attitude towards ILL as manifested in their positive evaluative judgments vis-a-vis ILL ideologies and principles across affective, cognitive, and behavioral domain of attitude. Along with their positive attitude, there were a number of influential factors extending to: the attention to ILL, the comprehensibility of ILL, the attractiveness of ILL, the acceptability of ILL, good mediators to understand ILL, the merit of the mediators to understand ILL, the understanding with respect to ILL, prior knowledge associated with ILL, social environment, the reasonableness of ILL, the habit of learning, the frequency of interaction with ILL, the professionalism related role, and professional efficacy. In turn, reflected on their positive attitude per se, they had also capably enacted three ILL principles in their English teaching practice. First, the active construction principle was implemented through engaging students to play guessing game, using intercultural material, and assigning activities like a group discussion, paired free talk, and peer checking. Second, the making connection principle was implemented through posing leading questions, comparing and contrasting two lingua-cultures, and assigning students to brainstorm ideas before speaking practice. Third, the interaction principle was implemented through tasking communication in group and assigning activities like reading comprehension, free talk, peer checking and peer interview. Given that they were just about to be the beginner English teachers, such efficacy to apply those principles became adequate evidence to reflect on their positive attitude towards ILL. Further studies are highly recommended to more deeply deal with the realm of ILL implementation in Indonesian contexts. Such studies can be meaningful references for Indonesian English teachers to apply ILL.
Keywords: Attitude; Intercultural language learning; Pre-service English teachers
