Critical intercultural awareness is an essential social element that fosters a willingness to interact and helps communicate effectively with people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, in the Indonesian higher education context, little effort has been made to promote the critical intercultural awareness (CIA) of students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. Anchored in Byram’s (1997) intercultural communication competence framework, this research project examines the ongoing development of students’ CIA through a ten-week pedagogical intervention using culturally appropriate YouTube clips with intercultural learning tasks on authentic input, noticing, reflection, and verbal output. It particularly investigates what emergent CIA attributes students can demonstrate and how. It also develops a model of intercultural awareness-based learning and explores students’ responses to the model after engaging in the intercultural learning tasks. This study employed a mixed-methods approach with concurrent triangulation design, involving a cohort of 50 undergraduate participants of mixed gender in five different faculties and from varying ethnic groups. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected to address the overarching research question: ‘Can Indonesian EFL students enhance their CIA by participating in a ten-week intercultural learning intervention using video clip-assisted intercultural tasks?’ The results showed a significant difference (Sig. 2-tailed value .001, p < .05) in participants’ CIA scores after the ten-week learning program. It also revealed that gender, faculty and ethnicity did not contribute significantly to the development of students’ CIA. The qualitative findings corroborated the quantitative findings, demonstrating that continuous authentic exposure to cultural issues through YouTube clip-assisted intercultural tasks could assist students in building their CIA. This study also found that all participants had positive perceptions of intercultural awareness-based learning. The YouTube clips functioned as culturally laden learning materials exposing intercultural realities and encounters, while the intercultural tasks assisted students in making meanings of the sociocultural issues portrayed in the clips. The teacher’s instructional scaffolding further played a vital role in helping them improve their intercultural learning and understanding. Despite the benefits of intercultural awareness-based learning, the participants reported several challenges that stem from both internal and external factors. Given these findings, some implications are drawn for Indonesian university EFL teachers and curriculum developers to integrate intercultural aspects into course syllabi and classroom practices
