Human history has been a history of individual countries, peoples and cultures until recently, today it is becoming a global unified history: everything that happens in the lives of individual countries, in one way or another, affects the life in other parts of the globe. Modern culture thus losing the uniqueness and isolation, and the boundaries between them have become blurred and disappeared gradually.
Nowadays, the study of intercultural communication deals with a group of Humanities: philosophy, psychology, sociology, Linguistics, anthropology, ethnopsychology etc.
Intercultural communicating means communicating among people come from many and various cultures face to face. For foreign language educators, to develop the learner’s intercultural communication competence is to know how to teach foreign culture. Culture teaching in foreign language teaching is a question countered by language teachers throughout all universities and colleges in the world. The relationship between language and culture is dynamic. Firstly, language is an important part of culture. It is the primary vehicle by which a culture transmits its beliefs, values and norms. Secondly, language is influenced by culture.Language is one of the most important carriers of culture and reflects the latter. If there is no language, culture would not be known. On the one hand, culture is the basis and one of the most important attributes of language and exerts
great influence on the latter. If there is no culture, language will be like water without a source or a tree without roots.
To maintain the diverse and multi-level contacts and forms of communication, it is necessary not only knowledge of the language, but also knowledge of the rules and regulations of foreign culture. Each participant of international contacts quickly realizes that one language is not enough for a full intercultural understanding, which requires knowledge of the process of communication, to anticipate possible incorrect understanding partners and avoid it.
The gradual development of the qualitatively new relationship between the countries has contributed to the creation of great opportunities for both foreign languages learning and their use in oral and written communication within the country and abroad. Accordingly, at the present stage of English language fluency as a means of intercultural communication in academic and professional environments, in situations of solving social and economic issues is an integral component of professional competence of specialists of any profile. With the learning foreign languages we learn the culture that belongs to people who speak on this language. And in this case we come across the term “intercultural learning”. The process of becoming more aware of and better understanding one's own culture and other cultures around the world. The aim of intercultural learning is to increase international and cross-cultural tolerance and understanding. This can take lots of forms — intercultural learning is by no means only a part of EFL, but has exponents in all fields of education.
In the process of experiential teaching, learning sessions were conducted with a full training package and not by the individual steps from the experimental materials. However, we describe only those points that are aimed at teaching to subject-role, social-role and personal-role communication.
The aim of social-role communication teaching was to teach students to adopt social roles, i.e. understand its
status and mode of communication. Students learned to use phrases for making requests, reporting, greeting, farewell, gratitude, apologies, invitations; they mastered nonverbal communication, using gestures and facial expressions; got acquainted with speech and non-speech behavior of native speakers, the country of the target language.
The aim of subject-role communication teaching was to:
– to teach how to adopt the role of the plot, i.e. nonverbal and verbal behavior should match the content of the story;
– to respond to verbal and nonverbal behavior of the partners in dialogue in accordance with their roles;
– to use phrases that match the accepted role.
Special attention is paid not only to the ability to behave in accordance with their role, but also, above all, to perceive and understand the role of the interlocutor(s), i.e., intragroup interaction.
The aim of the personal-role communication teaching was to:
– to teach the learner to interact with the interlocutor, i.e. be able to express the attitude to the subject (object) of discussion, to give reasons;
– be able to express agreement / disagreement with the opinion of other participants in the communication;
– listen to others and respect their opinion;
– react with emotional phrases to establish interpersonal relationships.
Let's look at some specific examples of pragmatic approach in teaching English. Preparing students for oral communication, it is necessary to pay attention to what type of questions are used by native speakers in different situations. So, in lectures at universities, where the language of instruction is English, echo questions are asked frequently, at the end of which keywords with higher voices are repeated. For example, Speaker: "... and the answer is the square root of X to the fourth power». Student: «The square root of X to the fourth power?
Popular questions that begin with the word «so» followed by a pause and then repeats the thought expressed to the rapporteur or confirmed what had been said or explained. For example, Speaker: «Elevated temperatures increase white cell activity». Student: «So, you are saying that elevated temperatures increase white cell activity?"
Traditional questions are also used, but they can be made to sound polite, if we pay in indirect questions, such as «And I don't know why you've taken against them so much. I wondered if you could explain this to me. " Examples of» communicative grammar may be used as modal verbs can, could and would, as well as in the Past Continuous Tense for polite requests. For example, «I was wondering if you could correct this letter for me». «I was hoping to speak to Mr. Adams». «We were thinking of using the company car for the trip. Would you mind?
It should be noted that the elimination of ethnic, racial and cultural barriers depends on the will, desire and ability of people to resolve inter-ethnic, inter-religious and intercultural conflicts. This is only possible on the basis of understanding and respect for social and cultural differences between peoples of the world and the practical implementation of the fundamental principles of intercultural communication.
Thus, professional intercultural communication is a component of the general culture of the student, which includes a combination of knowledge, skills and values, which contributes to the efficient solution of communicative tasks in a foreign language sociocultural environment.
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