Intercultural competence as an aspect of the communicative ...

introducing or teaching ICC in language classes. In that way learners would learn not to
use or rely on the linguistic resources of their own culture which inevitably leads to
negative judgments and pragmatic failure (Nelson et al. 2006).
Finally, both in-service and especially pre-service teachers should become
acquainted with the ICC teaching tools, of which the culture assimilator is only one, and
try to incorporate them into their teaching practice, in that way combining IC, pragmatic,
sociolinguistic, and linguistic elements.
6.3. Limitations
As other authors have noticed (Richards 2003; Lincoln and Guba 1985), there is a
difficulty in doing a qualitative study and maintaining a balance between uniqueness of
particular findings and the relevance of the study for a wider setting. Further, this study
had a rather limited number of participants, which might be one of the limitations. As it
has been mentioned, Lincoln and Guba (1985) propose transferability as a more suitable
concept than generalisation, that is, the research should provide enough information to
other researchers so that they ‘share in the researcher’s understandings’ (Richards 2003:
26). This study aims to do so through content analysis and thick description, triangulated
with quantitative data, researcher’s notes and English language courses syllabi.
Another limitation is the fact that the students volunteered for the interviews,
therefore making the sample a purposive random sample. The reason for this was the fact
that the researcher had a limited amount of time to spend in the classroom due to the time
constraints of English language teachers and demands of students’ courses. Therefore,
sifting the quantitative data for purposeful sample was impractical. Moreover, the
students were not given any compensation for their participation, and were not too willing
to take part. Therefore, even organizing these two phases sequentially might not have
given the researcher the participants for the second, qualitative, stage due to the
unwillingness of students to participate. However, this qualitative sample gave a needed
randomness to the study as it cut across all the departments included in the quantitative
stage.
Such a sample may seem as too narrow for a purposeful generalisation, however,
the very setting of a higher education makes the research narrow in nature. Generalisation
to other groups of learners without formal education would not be viable. On the other
hand, this group of students may well share the characteristics with some other,
international students, therefore making generalisations in that sense possible.
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