Culture and Intercultural Identity

Culture influences the priorities customers place on certain activities, consuming features and perceptions of services and/or products (Polsa et al. , 2013). Therefore, understanding the cultural differences of culturally diverse customers is an essential outline for understanding customer behaviour in an intercultural marketing context. Understanding themes and concepts based on a multicultural perspective has gained the attention of marketing researchers as a means to explain the attractive features, price perceptions and service satisfaction among customers (Huang et al. , 2016; Ihtiyar and Ahmad, 2015; Polsa et al. , 2013).

The significance of service industries has increased expressively within the past decades, particularly among industrialised countries. During the period of development, new challenges for service providers have arisen due, in part, by the varying demands of culturally diverse customers.

While attending the Workshop on Intercultural Skills Enhancement conference at Wake Forest University earlier this year, it became obvious to the author that many institutions' international education services and study abroad programs interpret global competence in the broad sense of cross-cultural skills and international experiences that do not necessarily include proficiency in another language. Intercultural competence, on the other hand, goes beyond sensitivity to suggest a dynamic process of active participation or engagement in communication guided by the awareness and understanding of culture.

Since societies develop mutual aims and different societies perpetuate developing long-term economic, social and cultural relationships with other cultural groups and the global instability continues hitting the world, developing intercultural sensitivity becomes more and more important at all levels of the education, especially for those who will teach other languages. One of the major aspects of intercultural communication competence is intercultural sensitivity which has been gaining increasing attention in different disciplines. This paper focuses on the importance of intercultural sensitivity and shares the results of a study on the intercultural sensitivity of Turkish ELT major (English Language Teaching) pre-service teachers.

How do articles get peer reviewed? What role does peer review play in scholarly research and publication?