International Journal of Language & Linguistics

Pre-Service EFL Teachers’ Social Intelligence and Intercultural Sensitivity
Gülten Genç, Emrah Boynukara

Abstract
In the 21st century, teachers are expected to help learners to get the ability of communicating with people from all over the world. In order to help students to gain the capability of communicating with people from different cultures and coping with the difficulties of various social and cultural environments, teachers themselves need to have those qualifications. Social intelligence or interpersonal intelligence is characterized by skills such as reading nonverbal cues and making inferences from the behavior of others. A socially intelligent individual is expected to have behavioral flexibility and to change his/her behavior depending on the circumstances of the situation. Intercultural sensitivity is the desire to motivate individuals to understand, appreciate, and accept differences among cultures, and to produce a positive outcome from intercultural interactions. For this purpose, this study aimed to investigate the intercultural sensitivity levels of prospective English teachers and possible effects of social intelligence and some demographic factors on it. The results indicated some meaningful relationships between social intelligence and intercultural sensitivity of prospective EFL teachers. However, age, communication with foreign people through internet and gender did not show any significant relationship with intercultural sensitivity. Some recommendations were yielded based on the findings of the study.

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