Intercultural foreign language communicative competence as the basis of teaching foreign language communication in universities

Intercultural foreign language communicative competence is regarded as a significant ability of university foreign language learners, which is obligatory for their taking part in an intercultural foreign language communication. The research is based on philosophical, socio-psychological and intercultural approaches to communication. Its main method is modeling, which assists to present the main notions as complex phenomena. The intercultural foreign language communication is represented by a four-component model including interacting subjects, communicative means, the socio-cultural environment of each subject and the intercultural environment where they interact and communicate. The model also demonstrates communicative, perceptive and interactive sides of the intercultural foreign language communication and shows their cooperation considering the objectives of interacting subjects and the functions of communication in an intercultural environment. The functioning of intercultural foreign language communication is determined by learners' intercultural foreign language communicative competence as a combination of foreign language communicative competence and intercultural competence. They operate on communicative and cognitive-interactive levels. The first level demands foreign language skills. The cognitive-interactive level expects learners' knowledge of the native country peculiarities, their comparison with facts of a foreign language culture and interaction techniques. Structural components of the foreign language communicative competence are linguistic and speech competences, the intercultural competence constitutes of social, socio-cultural, sociolinguistic and strategic competences. Components of the latter competence consisting of knowledge, habits and skills, interaction experience and psychological attitude sets are filled with intercultural content. As the results of the theoretical research the notion of the intercultural foreign language communication is more precisely defined and the model of the competence is presented. All these are important for exposing criteria for assessing intercultural foreign language communication formation, for choosing and organizing the teaching material and for creating didactics-methodical techniques that will assist to effectively form the competence.

Keywords

Authors

References