Critical thinking as a premise for the intercultural competence development

The intercultural orientation of education at the present stage is dictated by the objective conditions of the socio-economic and political context of the current century. Intercultural communicative competence is one of the main aspects of professional competence of a specialist. The intercultural orientation of language education is embodied in the objectives of the modern stage of development of the theory of teaching foreign languages. Language today is considered as a special tool for creating and interpreting the “image of the world”, which provides the opportunity to “penetrate” into world culture, as well as the individual’s awareness of their national and cultural identity, which in turn contributes to the formation and socialization of the student’s personality. Such an understanding of the language, as well as the specificity of intercultural communication leads to the need to consider intercultural interaction from the perspective of mental processes. It is thinking that, being the highest stage of human knowledge, allows one to gain knowledge about such objects, properties and relations of the surrounding world that cannot be directly perceived through sensory perception. Thinking is an integral part and a special object of self-consciousness of a person, the structure of which includes understanding oneself as a subject of thinking, differentiation of “one's own” and “other’s” thoughts, awareness of an unresolved problem as one’s own, awareness of one’s attitude to the problem. Critical thinking involves performing certain mental operations along with affective personality parameters. An analysis of intercultural communication from the perspective of cognitive personality parameters allows us to conclude that these parameters correlate with cognitive processes that form the essence of critical thinking and state the need for their interconnected development in the process of forming students' intercultural competence

An intercultural pragmatic approach to English-Russian and English-German renditions of the formulaic That’s what she said-punchline in telecinematic discourse

This paper takes an intercultural pragmatic approach to identifying and discussing rendition strategies of one specific punchline recurrent in scripted telecinematic discourse: That’s what she said. While this formulaic punchline demonstrates a relatively high salience in the US, particularly in oral and scripted genres, it issues more than one challenge to translators seeking to render it for other speech communities in a manner that acknowledges and retains the source pattern’s complexity as a discursively triggered and formulaic pragmatic idiom. We shall focus here on two specific target cultures, i.e. the Russian and the German, in demonstrating the challenges that this complex and linguistically as well as cognitively multi-faceted formula poses for its appropriation into either cultural sphere. Our study is based on a self-compiled parallel dataset of context-embedded source occurrences of That’s what she said and their renditions into German and Russian, thus offering immediately contrastive insights into the rendition strategies that translators have been employing to interculturally transfer this highly evasive idiomatic formula from one speech community to others

The Methodology of Intercultural Competence Development on the Basis of a Cognitive Style-inclusive Approach

AbstractThe author's view of the problem consists in the integration of cognitive, learner-centered and intercultural approaches to teaching intercultural communication. The paper shows that cognitive style is involved in the picture of the world's formation. The analysis of the intercultural communication phenomenon from the position of cognitive science reveals that one of the most essential conditions for effective intercultural communication is the cognitive readiness for intercultural communication that comprises of cognitive and communicative abilities to participate in the intercultural dialogue and can be improved by the development of a wider range of cognitive strategies utilized by a person in the learning process

Project based learning in teaching communication skills in English as a foreign language to engineering students

The aim of this paper is to consider project based learning as one of the most efficient and productive methods used in teaching English as a foreign language to engineering students of Russian technical universities. Special emphasis is put on communication skills to be mastered by future engineers through project based learning. It is of great importance to note that highly developed oral and written communication skills are valuable for engineering students wishing to become successful and competitive in the international arena. Hence, engineering students must be trained well to develop their communication skills in English in the field of professional activity, mainly in the science research area. An inter-disciplinary project designed on the basis of project based learning for the second year students of Tomsk Polytechnic University is reviewed in this work. The authors come to the conclusion that project based learning is an ideal teaching method since it allows engineering students to improve significantly their oral and written communication skills as well as apply the content knowledge in the field of their professional activity within the English language course

Interactive technology in teaching English oral academic discourse to master students

Modern educational paradigm based on the principles of learners’ initiative, focus on competences, computer-aided instruction requires designing of appropriate educational technologies that promote accomplishment of up-to-date top priority objectives of foreign language education. In the framework of this study, the authors examine and describe an interactive educational technology that aims at engagement of learners in the process of their professional activity integrated with the context of foreign language communication in the newly emerged forms by appropriate means of interaction. The paper focuses on specific features of the interactive technology that define content, approaches, methods and principles of teaching. The problem of determining the aspects of learning and teaching activities is discussed. The teachinglearning algorithm developed on the basis of the interactive technology is proposed. The algorithm involves application of several interaction-based methods, namely the project-based learning, tandem method, event-based learning, cooperative learning, and includes 12 steps. The major specificity of the teaching model manifests itself in the new-type nature of the teaching-learning process which takes place in the project-based research coworking. The results of the approbation have demonstrated that the interactive educational technology is characterized by a number of features, such as integrality, eventfulness, productivity, contextuality, contributing to the actualization of the subject position of Master students and their active verbal interaction. The results of experimental teaching have proved the effectiveness of the interactive educational technology in developing new types of communicative skills in Master students aimed at their ability to perform the function of confident interlocutors in academic communication

A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19

Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions1, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process2. In April 2020, an influential paper3 proposed 19 policy recommendations (‘claims’) detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supporting 16 (89%) of those 18 claims. The strongest evidence supported claims that anticipated culture, polarization and misinformation would be associated with policy effectiveness. Claims suggesting trusted leaders and positive social norms increased adherence to behavioural interventions also had strong empirical support, as did appealing to social consensus or bipartisan agreement. Targeted language in messaging yielded mixed effects and there were no effects for highlighting individual benefits or protecting others. No available evidence existed to assess any distinct differences in effects between using the terms ‘physical distancing’ and ‘social distancing’. Analysis of 463 papers containing data showed generally large samples; 418 involved human participants with a mean of 16,848 (median of 1,699). That statistical power underscored improved suitability of behavioural science research for informing policy decisions. Furthermore, by implementing a standardized approach to evidence selection and synthesis, we amplify broader implications for advancing scientific evidence in policy formulation and prioritization

Strategies in interpretation of culture-specific units by Russian EFL students

AbstractThe article aims at exploring the importance of strategic behavior for enhancing student comprehension of culture-specific language units. This case study is particularly focused on situation-bound utterances and opportunities for practice in strategy use. The authors present the results involving Russian EFL non-linguistics students to rely on conscious use of three taxonomies of strategies. It analyzes to what extent compositionality, closeness to own culture, and actual situational context help students comprehend and infer the meaning of SBUs in two organized ways of linguistic units’ delivery – contextual and isolated. The article gives evidence on the key role in interpretation process played by context

Critical thinking as a premise for the intercultural competence development

The intercultural orientation of education at the present stage is dictated by the objective conditions of the socio-economic and political context of the current century. Intercultural communicative competence is one of the main aspects of professional competence of a specialist. The intercultural orientation of language education is embodied in the objectives of the modern stage of development of the theory of teaching foreign languages. Language today is considered as a special tool for creating and interpreting the “image of the world”, which provides the opportunity to “penetrate” into world culture, as well as the individual’s awareness of their national and cultural identity, which in turn contributes to the formation and socialization of the student’s personality. Such an understanding of the language, as well as the specificity of intercultural communication leads to the need to consider intercultural interaction from the perspective of mental processes. It is thinking that, being the highest stage of human knowledge, allows one to gain knowledge about such objects, properties and relations of the surrounding world that cannot be directly perceived through sensory perception. Thinking is an integral part and a special object of self-consciousness of a person, the structure of which includes understanding oneself as a subject of thinking, differentiation of “one's own” and “other’s” thoughts, awareness of an unresolved problem as one’s own, awareness of one’s attitude to the problem. Critical thinking involves performing certain mental operations along with affective personality parameters. An analysis of intercultural communication from the perspective of cognitive personality parameters allows us to conclude that these parameters correlate with cognitive processes that form the essence of critical thinking and state the need for their interconnected development in the process of forming students' intercultural competence