Organization of students' intercultural competence formation in view of their cognitive styles

The cognitive style approach is considered to be one of the ways to create efficient learning environment aimed at communicative competence acquisition and facilitating teaching foreign language process at the university, since it is focused on the engagement of all student's personality resources in the learning and takes into account cognition processes of a foreign language acquisition. Since in the learning process cognitive styles manifest themselves as cognitive strategies, the allowance for students' cognitive styles in the process of communicative competence development implies such an organization of a teaching process that can provide the activation of different cognitive strategies and helps to achieve students' cognitive mobility. The article presents a methodology that allows integrating the development of student's personality cognitive parameters into the process of communicative competence development according to the steps of linguistic and speech units acquisition recognized in contemporary methodology. It requires differentiating between orientation, operational and creative stages. At the orientation stage the strategies of conceptualization and perception are to be developed. These include categorization, classification, generalization, systematization, anticipation, correlation, identification and others. At the operational stage the attention is paid to the processes of foreign information processing and contextual analysis and the strategies of synthesis, contextual guess, inference and others. Creative stage is aimed at the development of the strategies of critical evaluation and the objective interpretation of new information in a foreign language within intercultural dialogue. This stage involves problem solving tasks and simulations. The implementation of these stages is provided by various communicative tasks that are set with the help of instructions which implicate certain strategies to be applied to complete the task. The methodology requires a teacher to use the algorithm of teaching process allowing for students' cognitive styles organization when preparing for the lessons. It includes the preparatory phase, the performance phase, the reflection and monitoring phase that provide both students' communicative and cognitive development in the teaching process. It also helps a teacher to provide effective balance between cognitive styles involved by students into the communicative tasks performance. On the one hand, this allows assuring differentiation of a learning process as it creates advantageous language learning conditions for every student with their cognitive peculiarities. On the other hand, it conditions the wider range of strategies applied by a student thus contributing to learning efficiency.

Keywords

Authors

References