Tertiary English students’ attitudes towards intercultural language learning

The nature of English as the world lingua franca and the nature of Indonesian students who are multicultural call for the application of Intercultural language learning (ILL) approach in English education in Indonesia. However, the complexities of ILL seem to demand English teachers’ positive attitude towards ILL even since they became tertiary English students so that ILL could be ideally implemented in the classroom. This study was conducted to delve into tertiary English students’ attitude towards ILL and to confirm their English teaching practices according to the perspective of ILL principles. Tertiary students taking English Education major at a State University in central Java were chosen to be the participants. Interview, questionnaire, and observation were deployed to garner the data. The findings demonstrated that most of the tertiary English students had a positive attitude towards ILL. Their judgments exhibited a positive tendency to accept and support ILL ideologies and principles. Their positive tendency covered three dimensions: affection (76.13%), cognition (75.08%), and behavior (75.16%). Observations showed that their English teaching practices tended to confirm their positive attitude towards ILL. They were able to apply three ILL principles consisting of active construction, making connection, and interaction. Other studies are expected to address ILL implementation in the formal English classrooms at Indonesian schools so that detailed merits and challenges as well as solutions with respect to ILL implementation can be revealed.


INTRODUCTION
Today, English has become the world lingua franca (Fang, 2017;Kusumaningputri & Widodo, 2018;Liu & Fang, 2017;Mauranen, 2018) because the users of English include all world citizens . Kachru (1990) divides English users into inner, outer, and expanding circles. The countries of the inner circle represent those whose citizens use English as their first languages, such as the UK, the USA, and Australia. Those of the outer circle are the countries wherein Eng lish is legitimated as a second language such as Singapore, India, and Malaysia. In turn, those of expanding circles include the countries whose people use English as a foreign language such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and others. Hence, English is owned by all people in the world with different social functions rather than merely owned by its native speakers. The users of English in this sense are, by nature, mult icultural (Xerri, 2016) so that at the international level, English communicat ion always takes place within an intercultural or cross -cultural dimension (Fang, 2017;López-Rocha, 2016).
In the Indonesian context, the essence vis-a-vis intercultural co mmunicat ion seems to have also been a substantial issue inherent in the multicu ltural nature of Indonesian people. Indonesia, an archipelagic country, is inhabited by 250 million citizens fro m a great nu mber of various cultures (Sukyadi, 2015). With respect to such mu lticulturality, Hamied (2012) draws on an analogy between the use of Indonesian and English languages amongst Indonesian people. He elucidates that with their multicu lturality, Indonesian people use the national Indonesian language within an intercultural communicat ive framework. The same framework will also inherently exist when English as an International Language is used by Indonesian people. His analogy makes a convincing case for the importance of involving the nature of mult iculturality in English pedagogy in Indonesia. There is a vividly impo rtant implication as regards the foregoing analogy, in that once mult iculturality beco mes an integral part o f English education in Indonesia, it corroborates the rationale that interculturality should coat the framework of Eng lish commun icative co mpetence taught to students (Byram & Wagner, 2018).
To put it simply, if EFL learn ing is brought into the Indonesian context, the status of English as the world lingua franca and the multicu ltural nature of Indonesian people should become the bases of consideration since the way Eng lish is acquired depends upon those conditions. To deal with this complex phenomenon, many scientific works in the field of foreign language education promote the applicat ion of intercultural language learning (hereafter, ILL) approach, which has some alternative terms . To name a few, they are the works of Biebricher, East, Howard, and Tolosa (2019); Curtis, Robertson, and Mahony (2018); Hajisoteriou and Angelides (2016); Liddicoat and Scarino (2013); Popescu and Iordachescu (2015); Porto (2018); and Rauschert and Byram (2017). In the application of ILL in EFL learning, students are trained to communicate using English within the dimension of a third culture, namely the encounter between the first and second speakers' cultures. Such cultural encounter is what takes place when English is used as a lingua franca.
Besides the convenience of ILL fo r the Indonesian EFL learning context, however, this approach cannot be automatically and easily applied in Indonesia since the executors of this approach, teachers, need to have a positive attitude towards ILL per se . Th is positive attitude should be cultivated as early as their college years. A positive attitude towards ILL will make it plausible for teachers to continuously apply and develop their teaching on the basis of their students' mu lticultural nature, allowing students to exert their own cultures as a part of the language acquisition mode. In addition, students will not lose their own cultural identities due to the cultural replacement by the nativespeakerism paradigm.
A number o f prior studies related to ILL have been conducted. Those studies examined the effect of ILL on students' intercultural commun icative imp rovement (Tran & Duong, 2018), o ffered various techniques to be applied in support of ILL imp lementation (Ben moussat & Ben moussat, 2017), addressed challenges faced in the application of ILL (Biebricher et al., 2019), investigated both teachers and students' perceptions of culture learning and teaching in the context of ILL (Liu, 2019), and trained teachers to learn and practice ILL (Curt is et al., 2018).
In addition, prev ious studies on the attitude towards the entities corresponding to interculturality as well as intercultural language learn ing in the scopes of English and non-English languages have also been done. To name a few, there are studies conducted by Liu (2013) involving cultural learn ing as the attitudinal entity, Candel-Mora (2015) incorporating intercultural communicat ive competence as the attitudinal en tity, Tran and Seepho (2016) utilizing intercultural communicat ive language teaching and intercultural communicat ive co mpetence development as the entities of attitude, and Wang (2017) using intercultural awareness as the attitudinal entity.
However, to the best of our knowledge, none of those studies investigated the essence of attitude in situ, whose basis of investigation should ideally cover three dimensions of attitude comprising affection, cognition, and behavior. In regard to the importance of ILL and the attitude towards ILL, the present study is conducted to investigate tertiary English students' attitudes towards ILL and to confirm their English teaching practices according to the perspective of ILL principles to crosscheck their attitudinal stance towards ILL. To delve into tertiary English students' attitudes towards ILL in detail, Eagly and Chaiken's (2007) ABC model of attitude is adopted. According to this model, the term attitude can be summarized as the tendency one has to do or to behave in association with an attitudinal object. Such a tendency is generated from his/her evaluations or judgments passed on the attitudinal object in terms o f three dimensions comprised of affect ion, cognition, and behavior.
Thus, the present study brings with it an investigation of attitude into the aforesaid three dimensions with using ILL as the attitudinal entity and incorporating tertiary English students who will be the future's English teachers as the participants.
This study is considered important to be undertaken since it contributes to introducing the tertiary English students to meaningful language learning alongside the paradigm, knowledge, and pedagogical view as regards ILL's potential to suit the mu lticultural nature of Indonesian learners. Furthermore, the contribution of this study also extends to serve as one of the pro minent resources for the development of the Indonesian English education curriculu m that is more aligned with the needs of Indonesian EFL learners with their multiculturality.

Study context
This study sought to investigate tertiary English students' attitude towards ILL and their English teaching practices fro m the perspective of ILL principles. The participants of this study were the tertiary students who took an English education major at a State University in central Java. When the data were garnered, they were taking their micro-teaching class so the investigation into their attitude and English teaching practices could be executed efficiently. In this study, ILL was viewed fro m the construct of ten constituents comprised of five ILL ideologies and five ILL principles. The ideologies of ILL consisted of positioning English as the world lingua franca (Fang, 2017;Kusumaningputri & Widodo, 2018;Liu & Fang, 2017;Mauranen, 2018), making intellig ibility and comprehensibility the yardsticks of linguistic competence in English learning (Kirkpatrick, 2018;Sherman, 2018;Wright & Zheng, 2018), making intercultural co mmun icative competence (ICC) the framework of English commun ication (Galante, 2015;López-Rocha, 2016), pro moting students to be the competent intercultural English users (Kirkpatrick, 2018), and making the intercultural and competent nonnative English users the model in EFL learning (Kirkpatrick, 2018). Subsequently, the principles of ILL were co mposed of active construction, making a connection, interaction, reflection, and responsibility (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013).

Data collection
The data of tertiary English students' attitudes towards ILL were gained using a questionnaire and interview. Both interview and questionnaire were developed based on the construct of ILL ideologies and principles. The construct of ILL ideologies consisted of 5 indicators, namely positioning English as the world lingua franca, making intellig ibility and comprehensibility the yardsticks of linguistic co mpetence in English learn ing, making intercultural co mmun icative co mpetence (ICC) the framework o f English co mmunicat ion, pro moting students to be the competent intercultural English users, and making the intercultural and competent non-native English users the model in EFL learn ing. Subsequently, the construct of ILL princip les also consisted of 5 indicators, namely act ive construction, making connection, interaction, reflection, and responsibility. The questionnaire used a Likert-scale format providing four options from strongly disagree (SD), disagree (D), agree (A), to strongly agree (SA) under each item. The questionnaire items were presented in the form o f statements constructed from the aforesaid 10 indicators. The total number of items was 30. Items 1-10 negotiated the attitude towards ILL in terms of affection; items 11-20 negotiated the attitude towards ILL in terms of cognition, and items 21-30 negotiated the attitude towards ILL in terms of behavior. The follo wing table displays the blueprint of the questionnaire. Before using the questionnaire as the study instrument, two processes of validation were undertaken. The first process was expert validation wherein three experienced lecturers who taught sociolinguistics, teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL), and research methodology subjects were involved to evaluate the questionnaire. After some revisions, the second process was to try out the questionnaire to 20 tertiary students who were not the participants of the present study for the sake of gaining the validity and reliability scores. Based on the result of calculation using Bivariate Pearson correlation, the questionnaire items were considered valid because the value of r of each item exceeded the value of r table (0.4438) obtained fro m the criteria of (df = 18, with sig 5%). The obtained values of r of all items ranged fro m 0.52 to 0.78. Subsequently, according to the result of the reliability calculation using the Alpha Cronbach formula, the questionnaire was considered reliab le because the obtained value of alpha was 0.832, which was higher than 0.70. To gain the data, the questionnaire was further duplicated and distributed to the overall 31 tertiary English students who were taking their microteaching class. After the questionnaires were returned to the researchers, interview with 6 participants having been selected purposively was further conducted. The data fro m the interv iew were of importance to confirm those obtained from questionnaires. The foregoing process of data confirmat ion was done for the sake of reaching the data's credibility.
The observation was done in the micro-teaching class for about two months. The targeted participants were those who had been previously interviewed. The videos of participants' English teaching practices were made and used as the raw data. During the observation, the researchers also used field notes to record all observed data.

Techniques of data analysis
In this study, the data gained from questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistical calculations to gain the percentages of the participants' attitudinal judg ments. The interview and observation data were analyzed qualitatively by using the interactive model of data analysis, as recommended by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014). Resting upon this model, there were four foundational elements of analysis that worked in tandem. They entailed data collection, data condensation, data display, and verify ing conclusions. The processes of data collection conformed to the details e xp lained in the preceding paragraph. For data condensation, the data obtained were segmented, coded, and summarized. Continuously, the data were displayed by presenting some tables for the ease of viewing. Finally, all data which had been processed were compared to the pre -existing related literature, interpreted, and made logically conclusive.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The data of this study were oriented to tertiary English students' attitude towards ILL and their English teaching practices according to the perspective of ILL principles. The data are d isplayed in a number of tables. Adequate explanations and discussion in association with the data are also presented.

Tertiary English students' attitude towards ILL
Most of the participants who were given questionnaires and all selected participants that were interviewed showed that they had a positive attitude towards ILL. They gave their positive attitudinal evaluations towards ILL, which demonstrated that they accepted and supported the principles and ideologies of ILL. Their attitudinal evaluations fell into three categories of attitudinal dimensions: affection, cognition, and behavior. The tables displayed belo w depict the results of statistical calcu lations of the questionnaire data and the summarized interview data concerning the participants' positive attitude towards ILL in the affective, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions.
Grounded in Table 2, of 31 tertiary Eng lish students filling in the given questionnaires, 76.13% o f them affectively gave their positive attitudinal judgments on ILL; 75.08% of them cognitively reached their agreement on ILL; and in the behavioral aspect, 75.16% of them viewed ILL positively. Those percentages lied consistently in the ranges of proximate figures. It was clearly evident that most of the participants had a positive attitude towards ILL.

75.16%
Grounded in the construct of ILL co mposed of ILL ideologies and principles, the results of statistical calculations portrayed that most of the participants of this study positively passed affective, cognitive, and behavioral judg ments on positioning English as the world lingua franca, making intellig ibility and comprehensibility the yardsticks of linguistic competence in English learning, making intercultural communicat ive competence (ICC) the framework of English communicat ion, pro moting students to be the competent intercultural Eng lish users, making the intercultural and competent non-native English users the model in EFL learning, active construction principle o f ILL, making connection principle of ILL, interaction principle of ILL, reflection principle of ILL, and responsibility principle of ILL. Table 3 exh ibits that based on the interview data, the participants affectively manifested their positive attitude towards ILL by showing their ag reements, preferences, and interests in ILL. In the cognitive dimension, the participants showed their positiv e attitude towards ILL by positively co mmenting on ILL ideologies and principles according to their understanding, beliefs, and views. In addition, their behavioral judg ments on the imp lementation of ILL also portrayed their readiness to put ILL into practice once they became English teachers. The interview data consistently confirmed and supported those obtained from questionnaires. Table 3. Interesting data coded from the interviews

Affective judgments on ILL
The participants showed their agreements on ILL, preferences for ILL, and interests in ILL.

ILL ideology 1: English as the world lingua franca
The participants understood that this ideology conforms to the fact that English users encompass all world citizens.

ILL Ideology 2: Intelligibility and comprehensibility as the yardsticks of English linguistic competence
The participants believed that understandable messages or meanings are the keys to communication, so this ideology meets the essence of communication.

ILL ideology 3: ICC as the English communicative framework
The participants viewed that this ideology can enhance students' critical cultural awareness, and it meets the fact that one's culture as his/her communicative blueprint cannot be changed into others'.

ILL ideology 4: Becoming intercultural English users as the output of EFL learning
The participants viewed that this ideology aligns with the nature of English communication, which always takes place across cultures. It also fits the fact that one's culture typifies his/her own English variety.

ILL ideology 5: Intercultural and competent non-native English users as the model in EFL learning
The participants understood that this ideology promotes the mastery of ICC, and it is an easily accessed model in EFL learning.

ILL principle 1: Active construction
The participants believed that this principle could increase students' awareness of cultural differences and trigger students' critical thinking in English use.

ILL principle 2: M aking a connection
The participants believed that this principle promotes the realization of critical cultural awareness.

ILL principle 3: Interaction
The participants viewed that this principle facilitates a real intercultural communication in English learning, and it facilitates the mastery of ICC.

ILL principle 4: Reflection
The participants viewed that this principle helps students produce and interpret proper meanings while using English.

ILL principle 5: Responsibility
The participants viewed that this principle leads students to respect their own cultures and to maintain their own cultural values.

Judgments on ILL
The participants explained that the implementation of ILL fits the multiculturality in Indonesia, and it can prevent the loss of students' cultural morality.
The tertiary English students' positive attitude towards ILL indicates that there is a big possibility that they will apply ILL after they beco me pro fessional English teachers later. Ho wever, teachers' sole efforts of implementing ILL per se will not be effective because there must be other supports , such as an EFL curriculu m designed and developed resting upon the concepts of mult icultural education and intercultural communicat ion, detailed guidelines of the curricu lu m implementation, and training programs for both preservice and in-service English teachers as regards ILL implementation. A study conducted by Brunsmeier (2017) showed that although the teacher participants agreed with ILL concepts and goals, they did not yet apply ILL consistently because it was not the focus of teachers' lessons. This study implies that teachers' practical guidelines and training in respect of ILL are needed so that the teachers are not confused in implementing ILL, and ILL can be applied in an ideal and effective manner. The other study conducted by Oranje and Smith (2017) also emphasized that if teachers are not equipped with good methodological ILL practices, they will have difficulty applying ILL in the classroom. The same point is also reco mmended by Tolosa, Biebricher, East, and Howard (2018) in that in order to be able to apply ILL consistently, the supporting curricular programs such as pre-service and in-service teachers' training programs for ILL application are required. The data of the present study have illustrated that the tertiary English students already have a sort of psychological readiness to imp lement ILL when they become professional English teachers later as shown by their positive attitude towards ILL, but the consistency of their attitude will be very situated according to the curriculum underlying their teaching practices (Byram & Wagner, 2018). In short, ILL would be ideally applicable if the curriculu m is designed resting upon the concepts of mult icultural and intercultural educations alongside the provision of teacher training programs for ILL.

English teaching practices undertaken by tertiary English students in the perspective of ILL principles
Resting upon the data of observation, tertiary English students had implemented three principles of ILL. They consisted of active construction, making the connection, and interaction principles. To be compressed but made representative, the follo wing table displays some important points of the observation data.  Table 4, tertiary English students applied active construction principles through engaging students to play a guessing game, using intercultural materials, assigning a group discussion, assigning a free-talk activ ity in pairs, and assigning a peer-checking activity. With respect to making connection principles, they applied it through posing leading questions to students, comparing and contrasting two linguacultures, and assigning students to brainstorm ideas before speaking practice. Furthermore, they applied the interaction princip le through assigning a reading comprehension activity, setting co mmunication activities in a group, and assigning free-talk, peerchecking, and peer-interview activities.
In respect of the active construction principle, engaging students to play an English guessing game is useful to build up students' efficacy for reflective and critical thin king. Such a notion has also been recommended by Chlopek (2008). The use of intercultural materials is also really meaningfu l since learners will be directly mediated to be confronted with interculturality in English learning. Such materials are also very potential to improve students' crit ical literacy in intercultural English learn ing (Suarcaya & Prasasti, 2017). Subsequently, assigning students a couple of activities such as group discussion, free-talk, and peerchecking activit ies is also meaningfu l to lead students to be accustomed to enhancing their crit ical and reflective thinking skills wh ile coping with cross -cultural English communicat ion. Such act ivities are also generally called interactive materials and tasks (Tran & Seepho, 2017).
As regards making connection principle, posing leading questions to students is useful in the context o f English learning with interculturality in order to guide students to connect their schemata to the related topic o r issue brought in the classroom, and also to connect alongside to reorganize their cultural perspectives towards others' cultural perspectives. In addition, other merits beyond the us e of leading questions are also proposed by Çakmak (2009) and Hamiloglu and Temiz (2012). Those merits extend to triggering interest as well as curiosity pertinent to the given topic, guiding the focus on a certain point, build ing an active engagemen t in learning, triggering students to ask and answer one another, probing into certain problems the students confront with, opening chances for students to express their ideas and feelings, and facilitating students to connect and reflect on part icular information. Assigning students to compare and contrast two lingua-cultures during English learn ing is also meaningful. Such activity gives a big opportunity for students to be the proper intercultural English users who can respect their own cultures and others'. The meaningfulness , as such, has been scientifically proven by Suarcaya and Prasasti (2017) in their study. In turn, assigning students a sort of idea-brainstorming activ ity is also useful to make students capable of anticipating and getting ready before they are engaged in intercultural English communicat ion. Furthermore, as a sort of pre-teaching activity, other purposes of brainstorming extend to making students' language active, motivating them, and facilitating them to utilize their prior insights in a certain context while learning (Ghaemi & Hassannejad, 2015).
For interaction principle, assigning students a reading comprehension activity using English texts nuancing interculturality is really meaningful to facilitate them in order that they experience an intercultural encounter while learning English. Such mean ingfulness has also been scrutinized in the study conducted by Suarcaya and Prasasti (2017). In turn, a range of learning activities such as communication in the group, free-talk, peer-checking, and peer-interview activities also play a pivotal role in helping students experience interculturality in Eng lish learn ing. The activities, as such, are called interactive learning materials and tasks by Tran and Seepho (2017). They recommend that EFL teachers need to develop such materials and tasks for English learning on the basis of the intercultural education approach.
There were other ILL principles that were not applied by the part icipants in their micro-teaching class. They were reflection and responsibility principles. Based on the observation, there was one reason impeding them to manage to design learning activities applying reflect ion and responsibility principles. The reason was that the condition of their teaching practices was controlled by the setting of the micro-teaching class. In that class, the materials to teach had been previously planned as part of the class project in that each of the pre-service teachers had been tabulated to teach a particular material. The teaching materials given to them rested upon the common English materials based on the curriculu m of primary and secondary Indonesian schools. The planned material assigned to each of them had definitely been set to be different. Such a case was under the authority of the microteaching class project. This study did not have any right or authority to take part in the selection of the materials the participants should teach. Hence, a part of their teaching materials could be modified to meet the essence of interculturality so that they could implement three princip les of ILL, and the other part of the materials made them find it d ifficu lt to imp lement reflection and responsibility principles of ILL.
On the one hand, the reflection and responsibility principles could be ideally imp lemented if the teaching materials were h ighly and mostly nuanced in the sense of interculturality beyond English use. On the other hand, it was unfortunate that the participants did not possess the materials as such. Such a condition made a convincing case for the absence of reflect ion and responsibility princip les to be imp lemented. This condition is aligned with that in the studies conducted by Oranje and Smith (2017) and Tolosa et al. (2018), which emphasized that without adequate curriculu m supports, ILL cannot be effectively imp lemented. The provision of intercultural English materials deliberately designed for ILL is a form of curricular support to facilitate teachers in the implementation of ILL. However, g iven that the tertiary English students , who de facto were inexperienced or even just about to be the beginner EFL teachers, had been able to implement active construction, making the connection, and interaction principles, it was adequately evidenced that they had been competent at applying ILL at their pedagogical level. It is conclusive that their teaching practices sufficiently support their positive attitude towards ILL.

CONCLUSION
This study has revealed that most of the tertiary English students have a positive attitude towards ILL. Their judgments passed on ILL ideologies and principles in the dimensions of affection, cognition, and behavior become evidence of their positive attitude. In addition, reflected on their positive attitude per se , they have also been able to imp lement three ILL principles in their English teaching practices. First, the active construction principle is imp lemented by engaging students to play a guessing game, using intercultural materials, and assigning activities such as a group discussion, paired free talk, and peer checking. Second, the making connection principle is imp lemented through posing leading questions, co mparing and contrasting two lingua-cultures, and assigning students to brainstorm ideas before speaking practice. Third, the interaction principle is imp lemented through tasking communicat ion in groups and assigning activities such as reading comprehension, free talk, peer checking, and peer interview. Given that they were just about to be beginner Eng lish teachers, such efficacy to apply those principles beco mes adequate evidence to reflect on their positive attitude towards ILL. Other studies are expected to address the imp lementation of ILL in the formal English classrooms at Indonesian schools so that detailed merits and challenges , as well as solutions with respect to ILL implementation, can be revealed.