Seeking traces of interculturality in a language teacher education program: A case from Türkiye

In accordance with the shift in focus towards a culturally varied world, foreign language education curricula in most contexts have been revised integrating elements of interculturality. Yet, it remains unknown how successful these modifications are in achieving culturally decentralized and varied language education (R’boul & Saidi, 2023). Especially in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region where such research is scarce, it is essential to understand whether language teachers are trained in line with critical intercultural education, as these teachers will definitely be teaching in more culturally varied settings in the near future. Türkiye is no exception to this, and language teacher education curricula have been recently modified providing more space for intercultural communicative education. Considering these changes, the aim of the current study is to examine interculturality in field-specific elective courses offered in English Language Teaching (ELT) programs at a state university in Istanbul. A critical thematic analysis of culture-related courses is employed, following the two-step analysis offered in Lawless and Chen (2018). The analysis produces evidence demonstrating that interculturality is insufficiently embedded in the ELT curriculum, where it appears scattered across field-specific electives without systematic organization and within a narrowly confined scope. In brief, the study indicates that the specific ELT curriculum under investigation falls short of supporting culturally diverse language teacher training.