Starting from the premise that students attending bilingual programmes should have higher intercultural competence than the students of regular schools, the aim of our study was to test this hypothesis by establishing how much both groups knew about the basic intercultural determinants, how much they were interested in intercultural topics, and what they thought about their inclusion in primary and secondary school programmes. Our sample consisted of 630 bilingual and regular grammar school students. As expected, the bilingual programme students showed significantly higher knowledge of the basic intercultural determinants, which confirms that bilingual education ensures better intercultural competence. However, both groups showed comparable interest in including intercultural topics into the teaching programme, which clearly suggest that intercultural deserve more attention in education.
