Teaching students foreign language intercultural communication using the case method

Development of skills of foreign-language intercultural communication stands as one of the components of the development of students' foreign-language intercultural communicative competence. Achieving this goal requires selecting the content of teaching intercultural communication of students and choosing the appropriate teaching method. The case study method is one of the effective methods of problem-based learning, which consists in the analysis of a specific problem situation by students and the proposal of a possible solution. Despite its significant linguistic and didactic potential, this method has not been widely used in teaching students foreign-language intercultural communication. The purpose of the study is to describe the methodology of teaching students foreign-language intercultural communication based on the case method and the results of its testing in experimental training. In the course of the study, a nomenclature of skills of foreign-language intercultural communication was proposed, including both communication in the context of “dialogue of cultures” and “non-dialogue of cultures”: a) initiate foreign-language intercultural communication; b) maintain intercultural communication in the spirit of peace in order to achieve the goals of communication; c) critically interpret the facts and realities of another culture from the position of ethno-relativism; d) act as an intermediary between representatives of different cultures, neutralizing cultural contradictions, expressing respect for the representative of the contacting cultures; e) avoid situations of intercultural conflict; f) suppress intercultural conflicts; and g) come to an agreement in cross-cultural conflicts. Twenty 2nd-year students studying “Pedagogical Education” (profile: “English”) of Derzhavin Tambov State University took part in the pedagogical experiment on teaching the skills of foreign-language intercultural communication. Along with the traditional curriculum, students performed case studies based on authentic videos raising issues of racial, ethnic, gender, social and religious discrimination. The work on the cases included introduction to the case material (watching a film and selecting additional materials on the case problem), analyzing the situation, searching for possible ways to resolve the problem of cultural discrimination or aggression. To test the effectiveness of the proposed methodology before and after the experimental training, students were asked to answer the questionnaire questions. When answering each question of the questionnaire, each respondent assessed the degree of their agreement or disagreement with each simple consistent judgment regarding various aspects of participation in intercultural communication, from “completely disagree” to “completely agree”. The results of the questionnaire were processed using the Student's t-test technique. The obtained data proved the effectiveness of the methodology for developing the skills of foreign-language intercultural communication based on the case method. The paper provides a detailed description of the methodology, the subject-thematic content of students' training and the results of statistical analysis of experimental data.

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