Intercultural Communicative Competence and the Moroccan Sense of Belonging: A Comparative Study

In any teaching context, two significant variables to examine are students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and their sense of belonging (SOB). Despite the many research attempts that have tackled these two variables separately, they have rarely been combined in one single study, especially in the Moroccan context. Following this aim, the current study investigated the relationship between the two previous variables among the students of two master programs: Applied Language Studies (ALS) running at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in Meknes, and Religious Diplomacy (RD) at the faculty of Chariaa in Fez. To collect data, two different tests were adopted: the first test assessed the participants’ intercultural communicative competence, while the second measured their Moroccan sense of belonging. To compare the two groups of respondents, the scores obtained from the two tests were analyzed using, in addition to a mean comparison t-test, Pearson’s test of correlation. The results revealed an average level of ICC and SOB, along with a significant correlation between the two key variables for both the ALS and RD cohorts.