Revising a structure of intercultural competence: training intercultural interaction in the conditions of “Dialogue of cultures” and “Non-dialogue of cultures”

One of the main goals of teaching a foreign language along with cognitive development and upbringing is the development of a foreign language communicative competence and intercultural competence. Traditionally, the selection of learning content of students' intercultural competence in the process of learning a foreign language was carried out from the perspective of a “dialogue of cultures” - one of the types of relationships between contacting cultures based on mutual respect and mutual understanding of cultures. The methodological basis of the “dialogue of cultures” in teaching a foreign language was the works of Russian philosophers M.M. Bakhtin, M.S. Kagan and V.S. Bibler. As part of this approach, students learned to initiate intercultural contact, to act as representatives of their native culture, to support intercultural communication in the spirit of peace. At the same time, the modern multicultural world, besides the “dialogue of cultures”, is also characterized by other types of interrelations between cultures, which can be qualified as “non-dialogue of cultures”. These include manifestations of cultural aggression, cultural discrimination, cultural vandalism. For the existing reasons, the issues of teaching how to combat these phenomena, as well as the behavior of students in the context of “non-dialogue of cultures”, remain practically outside the linguodidactic consideration to date. However, without mastering the vital skills of inter-cultural interaction in situations of cultural conflicts, it is impossible to speak about the holistic formation of students' intercultural competence. In this paper, an attempt is made to expand the learning content of students' intercultural competence by including a number of skills of intercultural interaction in situations of intercultural conflicts. The author attributes the following to such skills: a) to avoid intercultural conflict; b) to suppress intercultural conflict; c) to reach a compromise in intercultural conflict; d) to persuade the participants of the intercultural conflict in their rightness. The paper describes in detail the content of each skill and proposes an updated learning content for students' intercultural competence, which includes three components: knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

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