| Summary: | Intercultural competence is important for one’s navigation in a multilingual and multicultural society. The CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learn-ing) approach is widely considered as having high potential in cultivating learners’ intercultural competence. This study aims to investigate CLIL teach-ers’ and pre-service teachers’ perceptions of intercultural competence and their understandings of the intercultural potential of CLIL.
This study was conducted in Finland. The participants of the study are four in-service teachers and four pre-service teachers. The target school offers small-scale bilingual education from Grade 1 to 6, and the university program in which the pre-service teachers study also involves small-scale bilingual ed-ucation. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and ana-lyzed using thematic analysis.
This study revealed that the in-service and pre-service teachers consid-ered intercultural competence from affective, cognitive and behavioral per-spectives. Moreover, the intercultural potential of CLIL was regarded to lie in appreciation of cultural diversity, insecurity management, confidence of communication with people from other cultures, skill of interpreting aspects of culture and relating them to each other, skill of communication and interac-tion with social appropriateness, and knowledge of other cultures.
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