The Big-Five Traits and EFL Teachers' Intercultural Intelligence

In today’s fast-speed ever-changing world, globalization has changed the meaning of distance by altering the world into a small village with an interculturally varied population. Besides, as one of the significant aspects of any society, teaching and learning have been of great priority and importance in all educational settings. In this culturally diverse world, it is so probable for most of the teachers to encounter classes and students with mixed and different ideas and intercultural values. Accordingly, since hiring qualified teachers for intercultural classes seems to be a delicate and important task, the researchers of this study find it of utmost value to discover any significant relationship between teachers’ personality traits and their intercultural intelligence. To this aim, the Big Five Personality Traits Questionnaire (John & Srivastava, ۱۹۹۹) which is used widely throughout the world to discover individuals’ personalities and differences, and the Intercultural Intelligence questionnaire (Caputo et al. ۲۰۱۹) to measure teachers’ ability to recognize intercultural differences and negotiation styles, were administered to ۲۰۳ Iranian EFL teachers teaching English in different language schools and Universities in Iran. To find the interrelationship among the two variables, a model was proposed and tested using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results of the study showed that among five personality traits, four sub-constructs (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness) are positive significant predictors of Intercultural intelligence; however, Neuroticism is not a significant predictor of overall Intercultural intelligence. Discussion and implications of the study were discussed at the end.

کلیدواژه ها:

Big-Five Traits ، EFL Teachers ، Intercultural Intelligence ، Personality Traits