Intercultural Competence, Perceived Support and Digital Literacy of Pre-service Teachers: A Model Based on Self-Determination Theory

© 2026 by the Authors. Licensee Whioce Publishing, Singapore. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

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Abstract

With the digitalization of education, pre-service teachers will need to enhance their intercultural communicative competence (IC) and digital literacy (DL) to take part in all sorts of various and technology-based learning environments. According to the theory of self-determination, this paper examines how IC, perceived support and the three types of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are related to the three factors of DL. Multigroup Structural Equation Modeling was used to analyze the questionnaire data of the 250 pre-service teachers in South China. Based on the above analysis, it is found that IC positively correlates with all three types of psychological needs, and in turn, these needs are related to different parts of DL. Competence is closely related to how well one has learned the new technologies. Based on the above results, the application of self-determination theory to the intersection of intercultural and digital competence has been expanded, and the motivation for pre-service teachers’ development of digital literacy has been revealed. Therefore, the teacher training program should include cross-cultural learning to support the inclusiveness and diversity of digital education.

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