Cross-cultural communication as the methodology of foreign language education

Currently strengthening discrepancies in our life force us to be able to live peacefully together and build a cross-cultural dialogue, using a foreign language. Implementing cross-cultural communication ideas into education is considered an important current issue, since the contemporary peculiarities of social and political life tend to provide mutual understanding and effective cross-cultural communication. Therefore, creating a methodological base of foreign language education seems to be a topical issue, the goal of which is to form the personality that is ready and able to maintain a cross-cultural dialogue. The main concept in cross-cultural communication is culture as a way of life and system of norms and values. That's why it is very important to define its dimensions in communication, i.e. shifting from one culture to bicultural contrast, including culture into communication, its various dimensions and influence on people's communicative behavior. Also, in cross-cultural communication there is an important question of how to describe a culture through language. Using the data of cognitive linguistics and psychology applied to cross-cultural communication, we can assume that culture is described through various types of knowledge: a) linguistic aspects; b) cultural aspects; c) aspects of using a language and norms of behavior; and using concepts as means of structuring knowledge and its verbalization. Studying the phenomenon of cross-cultural communication as the interrelation of representatives of different cultures shows that this type of communication is dynamic and can be described through discourse, considered as “speech plunged into life”, in various communicative situations, which signals about designing a new approach to education in a foreign language. Cross-cultural communication as a dialogue of cultures implies studying representatives of a foreign culture, their ethnocultural identity, national character, and peculiar way of thinking in the context “I - Someone Different”. Since cross-cultural communication means interaction, in the center of this interaction there are students, who are exposed not only to education, but to cross-cultural communication as well. In the modern multi-levelled educational system, the goal of higher education is forming an educated personality that is able to enlarge their knowledge, master their foreign language skills and not only participate in a cross-cultural dialogue (business, professional and every-day ones) but also transfer acquired strategies into their speech in the native language. All the mentioned-above characteristics of cross-cultural features form important theoretical preconditions for describing the methodology of foreign language communication. In the article, we state the following problem: why cross-cultural communication is methodologically important for foreign language education and for its main goal to form a culturally educated person.

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