Terminologies and definitions of IC are not consistently used throughout the literature. There are several synonyms used to depict IC, including cross-cultural communication competence (Ruben, 1989), intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997), intercultural sensitivity (Bennett, 1998), cultural intelligence (Earley et al., 2006), global leadership competency (Bird et al., 2010), etc. Nonetheless, IC seems to be an encompassing label and a generally preferred term to describe complex capabilities of interacting effectively and appropriately with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Fantini, 2009; Ang et al., 2015; Dypedahl, 2018).

To identify what it takes to be interculturally competent, a range of IC models have been developed over the years (see detailed review by Spitzberg and Changnon, 2009; Leung et al., 2013; Griffith et al., 2016). The most widely recognized and cited model of IC in formal foreign language teaching settings is proposed by Byram (1997). This model displays a set of individual knowledge, attitudes and skills that are essential for a competent intercultural speaker. Compared to the framework of “competence” in general educational theory, Sercu (2004) argues that Byram (1997)’s IC model is effective in addressing domain-specific knowledge, cognitive strategies, and affective characteristics but insufficiently addresses the metacognitive dimension. Working as the secondary thoughts, metacognition can amplify, attenuate, or even reverse primary cognition (Petty et al., 2007), and it may lead to changes in feelings and behaviors, making it critical in developing individuals’ competence (Metcalfe and Finn, 2008). In intercultural education, for true IC to be achieved, one should at least have a high level of self-awareness, an enhanced ability to self-assess, and a proclivity to reflect on one’s experiences (Lane, 2009). These competencies all relate to metacognitive growth. Thus, an IC model that clearly identifies cultural metacognition as an integral component seems justified.

A process-oriented model of IC proposed by Deardorff (2006) is the one that informs the current study. This model is used to explain the ongoing process of IC development in higher education context and assumes that the entire cycle of IC development begins with intercultural attitudes and then, motivated by which, individuals further develop intercultural knowledge and skills. The desired internal outcome (metacognition) later might be achieved, after which external outcome (intercultural communication and behaviors) can be realized through interactions. The external outcome can then be fed into attitudes, making the cycle fulfilled. Although it is possible for individuals to achieve minimal external outcomes by having the foundational attitudes alone, adding knowledge, skills and metacognition could facilitate more effective and appropriate intercultural interactions (Deardorff, 2012). This model supports the effectiveness of explicit IC instruction in language classrooms (Huang, 2021), but at the same time, it recognizes that IC development does not just happen through learning about cultural knowledge and practicing related skills. Just as Chua and Ng (2017), and Sharma (2019) suggested, learning how to think intercultural is more important than acquiring actual knowledge. Therefore, under the guidance of this framework, this study emphasizes the developmental elements contributing to IC, especially the role of metacognition, such as empathy, flexibility, and ethnorelative thinking (Leung et al., 2013), in providing a process for behavioral outcomes. This study also follows its view that IC development is a dynamic and cyclical process rather than an end result.

As stated in the introduction, cultural metacognition plays a critical role in the development of IC, which is primarily achieved by facilitating psychological and behavioral outcomes (Lane, 2009; Chua et al., 2012; Leung et al., 2013). It is suggested that individuals with higher levels of cultural metacognition are more aware of how their own culture influences their behavior and interpretations of intercultural situations, and thus making them more likely to query cultural assumptions and regulate their mental models during and after the interactions (Brislin et al., 2006; Triandis, 2006). Cultural metacognition also correlates positively with mental processes, such as conscientiousness (Earley et al., 2006), contextualized thinking and cognitive flexibility (Klafehn and Banerjee, 2008), affective closeness (Chua et al., 2012), stereotype judgments (Yzerbyt and Demoulin, 2012), and expectations of cooperative and relationship-oriented goals (Mor et al., 2013), which further contribute to cooperative behaviors in intercultural interactions (Chua et al., 2012; Morris et al., 2019). In addition to intercultural collaborative behaviors, large-scale quantitative studies show that cultural metacognition predicts a number of other performance outcomes, such as individuals’ behavioral enactment conforming to the role expectations in tasks (Ang et al., 2006; Malek and Budhwar, 2013), behavioral adaptations to cultural differences (Ang et al., 2006; Li, 2020), and cultural decision making (Rockstuhl and Van Dyne, 2018). From the above review, it is possible and practical to predict that instructional designs specifically address cultural metacognition may provide a robust foundation for developing learners’ IC.

As for how cultural metacognition contributes to intercultural effectiveness, Van Dyne et al. (2012) identify three self-regulated mental processes that work throughout intercultural interactions, namely planning, checking, and awareness. More specifically, before a culturally diverse encounter, planning prompts individuals to anticipate what they need to do and develop specific action plans in order to achieve certain short-term or long-term objectives (Van Dyne et al., 2012). During and after interactions, checking involves reviewing and questioning assumptions and adapting mental models when actual experiences differ from expectations. Awareness should always be present as it is about the real-time consciousness of how cultural factors influence the mental processes and behaviors of self and others. Together, these three constituent elements of cultural metacognition actively contribute to the transformation of thoughts into interculturally appropriate actions (Van der Horst and Albertyn, 2018). However, the challenge remains how to engage students in such metacognitive processes.

It is found that learners do not engage in metacognitive processes automatically unless they are deliberately asked to participate in purposefully designed activities (Bransford et al., 1999; Bannert et al., 2015). Thus, it is critical to integrate cultural metacognition in intercultural instructions and encourage learners to apply metacognitive skills to learning. Extant studies (e.g., Kramarski and Mevarech, 2003; Lane, 2009; Bryce et al., 2015; Bae and Kwon, 2019) show that metacognitive skills are “teachable” (Bae and Kwon, 2019, p. 4). For example, explicit coaching or discussion about metacognitive skills is an effective way to show students why metacognition matters and when and how to use the skills (Bae and Kwon, 2019; Santangelo et al., 2021). Turning to intercultural education, such metacognitive skills may include self-monitoring, which is used to constantly check for one’s cultural understanding (Phelan, 2019; Liao and Thomas, 2020), regulating, which involves adapting cognitive activities and ensuring the achievement of cognitive goals (Liao and Thomas, 2020), perspective-taking, which is also a reflective skill and involves considering how cultural factors shape individuals’ thoughts and behaviors (Lee et al., 2013; Van der Horst and Albertyn, 2018), mindfulness, which helps individuals avoid inappropriate or automatic behaviors by learning to observe their own thoughts, emotions, and habits (Thomas, 2006; Van der Horst and Albertyn, 2018), etc. While Earley and Peterson (2004) suggested decades ago that a specific discussion of metacognitive strategies in intercultural training could promote learners’ ability to transfer a concept from an example case to a novel situation, explicit coaching or discussion on these cultural metacognitive skills has rarely been conducted in classroom instructions for enhancing IC. Some other practical techniques, such as reflective questions (Kramarski and Mevarech, 2003; Nunaki et al., 2019), and reflective writing (O’Loughlin and Griffith, 2020), have also been verified as efficient in enhancing metacognition, but have not been sufficiently explored in the context of intercultural learning. As the above review indicates, explicit instruction and reflective practices are two major ways of promoting cultural metacognition, but the idea that these teaching techniques are related to students’ IC development needs further empirical work. Therefore, there are good reasons to purposefully design an instruction that integrates these techniques and examine whether and how such intervention could engage students in the metacognitive processes and further promote students’ IC. Accordingly, two research questions were raised:

To explore whether and how an instructional design focusing on cultural metacognition could facilitate students’ IC development in EFL context, this study was situated in an English Listening, Viewing, and Speaking course offered to Business English sophomores at an undergraduate university in Chinese mainland. The reason to focus on this course is for its clear teaching objective of IC development and its target students. As prescribed in the course syllabus, this course aims at enhancing students’ English listening skills, speaking skills, and intercultural abilities so that they can use English to communicate appropriately and effectively in both business and interpersonal settings. This course was taught by the author, a non-native EFL teacher, for 90 min each week. In a 16-week course design, 4 business-related topics were covered, namely making business appointments, meeting clients, entertaining clients, and visiting factories.

Fifty eight business English majors enrolled in the course as a compulsory subject in the third academic semester. They were selected as participants because there is a high potential for business-related majors to meet culturally diverse customers in the future workplace. Furthermore, as shown in Table 1, the participants were on average 19.3 years old and 87.9% were female. They all belong to the Han ethnic group (the largest ethnic group in the Chinese mainland, which takes up 91.11% of the population) (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021), and their native language is Chinese. None of them had international travel experience, but 25.9% of them had experience interacting with people from other cultures in English. Before implementing the instructional design, students were told the purpose of this study and were asked to sign the participant consent form voluntarily. Pseudonyms are used for all participants.

In order to engage students in metacognitive processes, they were given a multistage instruction for 8 weeks, which covers two topics (i.e., meeting clients, and entertaining clients). The instructional lessons were structured following Deardorff’s (2006) process-oriented IC model. More specifically, the 8 lessons progressively covered the cyclical process starting from attitudes, knowledge and comprehension, skills, internal outcomes (metacognition), to external outcomes (intercultural communication and behaviors). Explicit coaching and discussion on metacognitive skills, and reflective questions and writing were the instructional strategies used to promote students’ cultural metacognition. The details of the lessons are shown in Table 2.

In the first two lessons, around the topic of meeting clients, cultural differences regarding verbal and non-verbal communication in the workplace were introduced through audio and video materials in the textbook. In addition to guiding students to do relevant listening exercises, the teacher drew students’ attention to cultural knowledge and trained their skills of listening, observing, analyzing, and interpreting the intercultural aspects embedded in the materials. These activities also aim at advancing students’ knowledge of cultural knowledge as well as cultivating their attitudes toward cultural differences, such as curiosity, respect, and openness.

In the third lesson, the teacher explicitly lectured students on cultural metacognitive skills including self-monitoring, regulating, perspective-taking, and mindfulness. The teacher then introduced a task which was inspired by “Images of Others – An Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media” (hereinafter abbreviated as the Autobiography), which is a tool published by the Council of Europe to develop learners’ IC by encouraging learners to explore the intercultural encounters through images represented in books, television, films, Internet, etc. (Byram et al., 2009). Considering that in-person intercultural experiences are not so common for students in domestic educational contexts, visual media provide important opportunities for them to engage with different cultures. Thus, the Autobiography can help students reflect on how they think and feel about a particular image and what they can learn from it for future intercultural encounters. In this task, students were encouraged to work in groups of 5–6 and choose a specific image that shows someone from different cultural background. A list of guiding questions adapted from the Autobiography was provided to elicit students’ perceptions and feelings of people from other cultures. Furthermore, to involve students in cultural metacognitive processes and promote them to examine themselves objectively, some questions were developed to address the three specific metacognitive mental processes (see examples in Table 3).

In lesson 4, students were asked to present the results of their group discussions in class. After each group’s presentation, other groups were encouraged to ask questions and discuss differences in their views. The teacher also put forward further questions either to encourage positive intercultural attitudes or challenge possible stereotypes and prejudices. Through receiving feedback and defending their own positions, students could continuously question their previous assumptions and adjust mental models. At the end of this lesson, students were given an after-class reflective written task that prompted them to reflect on their intercultural experiences in group work. This task included questions such as what helped you understand the people in the image? What do you think you can do to make it easier for you to understand each other? Has analyzing the image changed your thinking in any way? Will you do something as a result of analyzing the image?

Lesson 5 and 6 were delivered in the same way as the first two lessons but covered another topic, which is about cultural differences in business etiquette regarding entertaining clients. In lesson 7, the teacher first guided students to reflect on and discuss the metacognitive skills they used in the Autobiography task and further explained how these skills helped students in their intercultural experiences. Then, the teacher presented a task that requires students to role-play the following situation: suppose you are going to receive people shown in the image as your clients and you are planning some activities that can entertain and impress them, try to ask them as many appropriate questions as possible and discuss with them the schedule regarding sightseeing and dining in one city in China. In lesson 8, students were required to present their role-play dialogs in class. Other groups were encouraged to share comments on the presenters’ performances. At the end of this lesson, students were given an after-class reflective written task prompting them to reflect on their role play. Reflective questions include: what helped make you more appropriate and effective in the role-play? What would you do to further develop your intercultural competence?

Taking account of the complex nature of IC, researchers (e.g., Fantini, 2009; Deardorff, 2015) highlight the necessity of using a multi-method, multi-perspective approach to assess IC. Hence, a mixed methods approach with self-reflective questionnaires and focus groups was employed to address the two research questions and triangulate the results.

Pretest and post-test questionnaires using a 6-point Likert scale (0 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree) were administered to participants to see if the instructional design was effective in enhancing their IC. The questionnaire contains 32 questions in total. In addition to the 5 questions which addressed participants’ demographic information, 27 questions covering 4 subscales of IC, namely, knowledge, affective orientation, behavioral performance, and cultural metacognition were adapted from Chao’s (2014) Intercultural Competence Scale (ICS; Chao, 2014). Different from a number of existing self-assessment instruments that are intended for English as a second language (ESL) learners or learners who study overseas, ICS is specifically designed for EFL learners in higher education and written in Chinese. Hence, ICS can well address the population in this study and serve the research purpose. Also, the dimensions of IC covered in this questionnaire are consistent with Deardorff’s (2006) categorization of IC, and the detailed information is shown in Table 4. Fifty-eight students completed both the pretest and post-test before and after the instructional lessons. The data gained from questionnaires were analyzed by a paired sample t-test by SPSS 28.0 to determine whether there were statistically significant changes in students’ self-perceived IC after the instruction.

According to Deardorff’s (2006) model, IC development is a process rather than an end result. Therefore, there is a need to explore the process of how learners develop their IC with the facilitation of the instructional design. In this study, the focus group, a qualitative method which is productive in gathering detailed opinions and knowledge around a particular topic (Cohen et al., 2018), was applied to elicit EFL learners’ perceptions of how the explicit coaching and discussion on cultural metacognitive skills, and reflective questions and writing help them develop intercultural knowledge, affect, and behavior. As the author taught the course and was familiar with the participants, the author held focus group interviews for each group upon the completion of the lessons. Fifty-four students voluntarily participated in the focus group interviews, and thus, 10 focus groups were conducted (n = 6, 6, 5, 6, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 5). To promote participation, the interviews were carried out in Chinese. The data derived from the focus group were transcribed verbatim and then analyzed following a thematic analysis which can be referred to Braun and Clarke (2006) guidelines. The author first read the transcripts iteratively and gain familiarization in order to generate initial codes. Through coding, all raw data were organized into meaningful groups (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Then, some codes were combined to form overarching main themes, and some codes were sorted into sub-themes (Braun and Clarke, 2006). A colleague of the author was invited to recheck the codes and themes to ensure that the data had been interpreted appropriately. To further achieve validity and credibility of the analysis, the codes were presented to 5 participants to check if there were any misinterpretations (Dörnyei, 2007). The preliminary themes were further reviewed and refined through rereading the data, leading to the naming of the final themes. Main recursive themes include intentional knowledge acquiring, positive intercultural attitudes, and the transformation of cognition into actions.

Cronbach Alpha testing was first conducted to check the internal reliability of each dimension of the ICS questionnaire. As shown in Table 4, the reliability of the knowledge dimension was 0.91 for the pretest and 0.93 for the post-test; the affective orientation dimension was 0.90 for the pretest and 0.87 for the post-test; the behavioral performance dimension was 0.92 for the pretest and 0.87 for the post-test; the cultural metacognition was.90 and.86 for the pretest and post-test, respectively.

The sample of 58 students had a mean score of 72.36 with a standard deviation of 12.74 for the overall questionnaire in the pretest. In the post-test, the mean score was 81.19 with a standard deviation of 12.02, displaying a change mean increase of 8.83. Table 4 further presents the mean score and standard deviation of each dimension of IC. It can be seen that the mean scores of students in the four IC dimensions improved to some extent after they participated in the instruction. To further examine whether these changes were meaningful before and after the instructional lesson, the paired sample t-test was conducted to compare the means of students’ performances in the pretest and post-test.

Table 5 shows the results of the paired sample t-test for the pretest and post-test of IC development in terms of the four dimensions. For students’ overall IC, there was a significant difference between the pretest and post-test (t = 4.92, p < 0.001). This could mean that the instructional design contributed effectively to students’ overall IC development. Concerning the dimension of IC knowledge, the t-value is 0.63 (p = 0.529 > 0.05). This indicates that there was no significant difference in students’ IC knowledge after receiving the instruction. It can be inferred that students did not perceive any progress in enhancing their cultural knowledge. Furthermore, the value of ps were less than.001 (p < 0.001) for the dimensions of affective orientation and cultural metacognition, suggesting that the instruction significantly facilitated students’ affective orientation and cultural metacognition. In the behavioral performance dimension, the value of p was.022 (p < 0.05). It can be assumed that the instruction was also significantly effective in enhancing students’ behavioral performance. From these quantitative findings, it can be concluded that the instructional design was effective in enhancing students’ IC in terms of affective orientation, behavioral performance, and cultural metacognition, but not in advancing their IC knowledge.

By coding and analyzing the qualitative data gained from focus group interviews, general themes around the effects of the instructional design on students’ IC development emerged. The main themes are synthesized as the following to answer the second research question.

Quantitative findings provide evidence for the first research question that the instructional design featuring cultural metacognition was effective in facilitating participants’ IC development. The 58 participants significantly showed development in their self-perceived IC in terms of affective orientation, behavioral performance, and cultural metacognition as measured by the ICS questionnaire, but they did not perceive significant growth in their intercultural knowledge. Furthermore, as confirmed by qualitative results, participants showed an increased level of positive attitudes and behavioral performance along with their improved cultural metacognitive thinking through participation in the instruction. In general, these different dimensions of IC development can be explained by the process-oriented model of IC proposed by Deardorff (2006), which emphasizes the cyclical development of IC with the facilitation of all components. Accordingly, the increased cultural metacognition may contribute to enhanced affective orientation and behavioral performance.

As for the knowledge dimension, qualitative data suggest that participants were willing and ready to acquire new cultural knowledge driven by the reflective questions and the explicitly taught metacognitive strategies. However, consonant with the quantitative findings, there was no evidence to support participants’ increased knowledge. This may be due to two reasons. On the one hand, the instructional activities only involved students focusing on specific cultural knowledge relevant to particular images. They did not get the chance to further enrich culture-general and culture-hybrid knowledge as reflected in the questionnaire, such as common rules and values of other cultures, and knowledge about the negotiation strategies. On the other hand, when students constantly monitor their knowledge use with the aid of cultural metacognition strategies, they may feel that their knowledge is still insufficient for them to handle all sorts of intercultural interactions. As a result, students with such concerns may not show significant improvement in their self-rated performance of intercultural knowledge.

To answer the second research question of “how does cultural metacognition contribute to students’ IC development?,” three general themes in relation to the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions emerged from qualitative data, namely supporting intentional knowledge acquiring, developing positive intercultural attitudes, and promoting the translation of cognition into actions. The first two findings concur with previous studies (e.g., Petty et al., 2007; Wegener et al., 2012; Liao and Thomas, 2020) that cultural metacognition provides an impetus for learners to manage cognition in order to complete certain intercultural tasks and develop positive intercultural attitudes toward novel intercultural situations. The current study further confirms the effectiveness of teaching techniques focusing on cultural metacognition, such as reflective questions and written tasks, and explicitly taught cultural metacognitive skills including self-monitoring, perspective-taking, and mindfulness. Moreover, it is noteworthy that students attempted to improve their cognition relevant to intercultural interactions through active self-learning, which is an indispensable asset both for IC development and lifelong learning. Shifting attention to the behavioral aspect of IC, although prior studies (Thomas, 2006; Van der Horst and Albertyn, 2018; Liao and Thomas, 2020)) have theoretically proposed the critical role of cultural metacognition in linking cognition and culturally-appropriate behavior, this study provides empirical evidence that cultural metacognition functions through continuous proactive awareness, monitoring and controlling of one’s cognition, focusing on knowledge relevant to the intercultural interaction, and intentional planning of appropriate behaviors before the interaction.

The current study not only confirms the effectiveness of the instructional design featuring cultural metacognition in enhancing different dimensions of IC in EFL context, but also offers additional evidence of how this was achieved through a range of metacognitive processes. Accordingly, it provides two implications for practical IC teaching in EFL context.

First, this study provides evidence for the value of teaching techniques, such as explicit instructions on metacognitive skills and reflective practices, for promoting learners’ cultural metacognition and further leading to IC development. As mentioned earlier, while these techniques have been verified as efficient ways of promoting metacognitive skills (e.g., Bae and Kwon, 2019; O’Loughlin and Griffith, 2020; Santangelo et al., 2021), there are few empirical studies offer insights into how could these techniques contribute to cultural metacognition development in the context of intercultural education. Earley and Peterson (2004) suggest that a specific discussion of metacognitive strategies in intercultural training could promote learners’ ability to transfer a concept from an example case to a novel situation, and this study further enriches and extends the positive effects of cultural metacognition on EFL learners’ IC development. Furthermore, this study suggests that these teaching techniques should be incorporated into IC teaching routines rather than a one-time training so that students could develop habits of monitoring, regulating, planning, and reflecting and use these metacognitive skills more often in new intercultural contexts. Moreover, as IC development is an ongoing and cyclical process (Deardorff, 2006), teaching activities should not only focus on cultural metacognition but also on other IC components in order to develop learners’ IC comprehensively.

Second, as previously stated, one of the key challenges of developing EFL learners’ IC in Chinese domestic higher education context is the lack of authentic intercultural experiences. Deardorff (2012) also argues that IC development does not occur in a vacuum, and as indicated by his IC model, it is through interactions that individuals turn internal metacognitive outcomes into external behavioral outcomes. Considering this deficiency of implementing IC teaching in EFL context, this study employed group work to encourage students to interact with others who may hold different cultural values in the Autobiography task, and it employed role-play to simulate intercultural interactions. Although these interactions were not enough to encompass the complexities and uncertainties of authentic intercultural encounters, cultural metacognition could equip students with the necessary skills to face what they will encounter in new situations. IC development not only occurs in interactions with people of highly diverse cultural backgrounds, but also happens in classroom processes, and in interactions between co-cultural groups of students and between teachers and students (Wang and Kulich, 2015). What is critical is preparing learners with higher-order and transferable skills. Thus, this calls for morew practical teaching and research to explore the role of cultural metacognition in IC learning in EFL contexts.