Mastering Intercultural Communicative Competence By Foreigners At The Russian Language Lessons

Abstract

The article deals with the creation of qualitatively new educational model of business collaboration, capable of ensuring communicative interaction in the intercultural space. Under the current conditions of expanding international cooperation, specialists of different spheres should master foreign language as a tool of professional intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It is confirmed by legislative documents, e.g. the Federal state educational standards. However, we note certain contradictions between the theory of intercultural communication developed in linguodidactics and the methods of teaching business Russian. The most significant is the lack of their integration in the branch of training foreign students to interact in business communication. Hence, we return to the issue of language personality in a foreign language environment and the processes of cognitive consciousness transformation. In native culture the language is assimilated through reality, while in foreign, “alien” culture, reality is perceived through language. Therefore, we have considered the process of communication participants’ interaction as a complex synergetic system. The analysis of definitions, generalized knowledge and skills inherent in mastering the ICC, allowed determining it as distinguishing lexical units with a national-cultural component of semantics, the ability to interpret the content of such vocabulary, to use background experience to achieve mutual understanding in situations of direct / indirect intercultural communication. Thus, the traditions adopted in the culture of business partners actualize that obviously influences the effectiveness of communication.

Keywords: Concept spherelanguage personalitybusiness communicationcultural synergy

Introduction

In the modern world, being covered with the processes of globalization, the ability to conduct a “dialogue of cultures”, to communicate effectively with representatives of foreign-speaking communities, is of particular relevance. Students specializing in foreign languages should possess intercultural communicative competence (further, the ICC), which supposes capability to carry out effective intercultural communication by means of certain cognitive, affective, behavioral skills, and personality traits. This is especially focal while training specialists who interact with partners of different cultures. Hence, the concept of Prozumentova describing the appeal to dialogue is devoted to the issues “pedagogy of collaborative activity” (Koroleva & Pozdeeva, 2017). Also in educational practice with foreigners, there are real foundations for the development of the ICC.

The distinctive feature and complexity of teaching foreigners the Russian language necessitates systematic work on providing knowledge, improving abilities and skills that contribute to their mutual understanding in intercultural communication based on the “cultural dialogue”. However, it should be recognized that not all cultural contacts could be qualified as a dialogue. In the philosophical analysis of communication Kagan designated three types of cultural relationship: full-fledged, equally right dialogue; acculturation – utilitarian attitude of one culture to other, when one of the cultures imposes its system of values and norms on another; pseudo-dialogue, or complete rejection of one culture by other (as cited in Sysoyev, 2018).

Namely for this reason “dialogue of cultures” as a philosophy of cultural interaction in the modern world formed the basis for the development of the current intercultural paradigm of language education that is reflected in the terminological and conceptual apparatus of the methodology of teaching foreign languages. We reconsider the construct of the ICC in the content aspect of teaching foreign language intercultural communication. From this point of view, the learning object of training for the process of ICC formation is relevant to competence-based and synergetic (teacher–student interaction) approaches (Johnson, Johnson, & Johnson-Holubek, 2001).

As Khutorskiy (2003) notes: “the peculiarity of pedagogical goals for the progress of competencies is that they are formed not as teacher’s actions, but results of the student’s activities, that is promotion and development in the process of mastering a certain social experience” (p. 56). Based on this approach, foreign students assimilate social experience; manage unique personal qualities in the educational processes that contribute to self-development – motivation, reflection, system knowledge. Reflection (in the meaning “turning back”) is a form of theoretical human activity, designed to understand someone’s own actions and laws, the activity of self-consciousness, revealing the specifics of human spiritual world. In intercultural communication, reflection allows analyzing, correcting and regulating relations between participants of business interaction (Chernyaeva, 2016).

Unfortunately, it is impossible in one article even just to list all the outstanding domestic Russian and foreign scientists in the field of language and culture research, discourse practices, didactic developments within the competence approach and socio-psychological theses. Their further expansion caused the availability of many additional thematic works in the linguistic and cultural aspect with different directions of the multi-vector plan. Thus, let us thank all researchers whose labours serve the conceptual support and are related to the essence of our analysis. We would like to mention and further represent briefly the new results described in some issues.

At the same time, the discussions with Russian teachers and observations of the pedagogical process of teaching business Russian demonstrate the lack of foreigners’ readiness to act as full-fledged participants in the process of intercultural business communication.

Problem Statement

In business interaction with other cultures, the special importance is attached to the verbal communication, which is expressed in the ability to select some specific language tools that contribute to the most effective achievement of goals during communication with representatives of different cultural communities, taking into consideration the psychological mechanisms of influence on the recipient. Business communication style requires uniformity and accuracy in verbal communication (Skurikhin, 2017). Knowledge of various discourse types (conversational, telephone, written, business, scientific, technical), the ability to create and interpret them in accordance with the conditions and communicative task is necessary in specialized areas of human activity.

The relevance of this study is due to the fact that in subjects of intercultural business discourse, “one’s own” and “alien” should be logically ordered. The process of arrangement “one’s own” as an extra-systemic element and “alien” as an object of assimilation always takes place in a business interaction of different culture representatives. Entering into communication, native speakers of the Russian language are guided by the foreign system of their partners’ national stereotypes.

We use techniques and practical tasks in an attempt to prove that the preparation of future Bachelors of Linguistics level B1 to participate in intercultural business communication becomes more effective if:

• the specificity of business communication in the intercultural context of its implementation is discovered;

• the synergetic nature of intercultural business communication as a complex system of interaction between languages and cultures is designated;

• the content parameters of the methodical system of teaching foreign students intercultural business communication are determined.

We also pay attention to the significance of specific characteristics of intercultural business discourse, namely direct or indirect communication of various cultures representatives and their ability to recognize each other’s differences as an important component of cultural interaction.

Research Questions

We perceive the communicative competence in the modern methodology as the ability to solve by means of a foreign language the focal problems of communication in everyday, educational, industrial and cultural life of society and particularly, students’ life. In the ICC’s structure, there are several similar components: linguistic (language), discursive, strategic, social, regional studies, among which combinations of culturally oriented competences, including the intercultural, are further designated (Karpechenkova, Oleynik, & Spiridonova, 2015).

Nowadays it seems necessary to expand the content of teaching intercultural communication with aspects related to the student’s ability in a safe form to withstand “non-dialogue of cultures” (Sysoyev, 2018). The need to master intercultural competence presents fundamentally different requirements for teaching foreign languages. The criteria for the ICC’s formation are knowledge of the specifics of communicant’s national image and possessing paralinguistic information (Suetina, 2015).

The achievements of functional linguistics for improving the language training of specialists, who are to interact with foreign partners whether in economics politics or social spheres, have been described in scientific research papers and implemented in the educational processes. Some applied aspects of functional linguosynergetics are associated with the development of effective methods of speech exposure, which plays an important role in business communication. For example, noting the interest of employees of companies and organizations in personnel who speak not only the general Russian language, but also a certain sub-language of Russian, in 2010 the author program for a Russian language course in business for Bachelor students was developed (Dabrowski, 2017).

Another find is related to doing business in the Asia-Pacific region based on disciplines in foreign languages. Here we single out a change in orientation toward preparing for intercultural business interaction between Russians and their neighbors in the nearest rim. On the one hand, business communication is defined as business, professional, corporative interaction. On the other hand, this is everyday (regular), social interaction, since human life cannot be separated and divided into professional and social spheres. For example, a Russian businessperson who collaborates with travel companies in the North-Eastern China not only negotiates at office, but also often moves around the country, talking with colleagues, representatives of related enterprises, their employees, just neighbors and acquaintances. Discussion of projects may be continued at a business dinner or during a meeting with the family of a Chinese partner (Dolgan, 2016). At the same time, Asian business partners are showing interest in mastering the Russian language with a specific focus on the development of the ICC.

Researchers also prove the feasibility of active extracurricular work to intensify the formation of the ICC (Dmitrieva & Koroleva, 2019).

Our analysis of the studied sources allows concluding that the oral business discourse in the activities of various organizations involved in intercultural communication, as a rule, consists of common stable utterances that are acceptable for many areas of human life. Nevertheless, to achieve maximum effect in a business conversation, along with speech clichés, terms, thematically oriented vocabulary it is appropriate to use the specific means for laconic expression of thoughts and capacious ideas – epithets, comparisons, analogies, metaphors, universal idioms and phraseology (Chernyaeva, 2016).

We believe that being acquainted with aphorisms while mastering the Russian language foreigners at the same time join the new national culture. “Language aphorism is a phrase that is known by all and, therefore, it is not created anew in speech, but extracted from memory” (Vereshchagin & Kostomarov, 1983, p. 91). Let us define as aphorisms – proverbs and sayings, catch phrases, mottos, slogans, social and scientific formulas and natural-scientific formulations, which form an integral part of the Russian language vocabulary, but in methodological aspect they have not received proper interpretation for a foreign audience. These language units are significant in terms of linguistic and cultural studies, they belong to the so-called “compositional units”, which directly reflect the extra-linguistic content of speech. About 25–30 % of their total number contain a national-cultural component in their semantics and should be used in teaching Russian as a foreign language (Karpechenkova et al., 2015). However, the analysis of coursebooks showed that there is no developed system of exercises with the considered language material. There is no methodically based set of exercises aimed at mastering the ICC by foreigners on these language units, including in business communication (Matyukina, 2014).

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this research is to substantiate theoretically and at least briefly to represent a model of cultural synergy in the formation of intercultural communicative competence, or a synergetic model of business discourse for foreigners of level B1, who simultaneously master the Russian language and the specifics of business communication in the field of cultural interaction. While describing the complex process of neutralizing “one’s own” and actualizing expediency of following “alien”, we have involved practical tasks in the Russian language, including the material of precedent phenomena (Gudkov, 2003), which have linguacultural specificity. In this situation, the “alien” becomes a non-systemic element that organizes all the steps of partnership. At the same time, the meaning of intercultural dialogue depends on the concept that underlies the context of business partners’ interaction.

Research Methods

In communication between representatives of different cultures, the interacting Subjects find themselves in distinct from each other intercultural environment, prompting as a means of communication to choose common understandable language. In this case, the native language and culture of the subjects, on the one hand, appear to be outside the direct process of intercultural communication, and on the other hand, they are immanently present within it, reflected in the personality of the subjects in intercultural dialogue as bearers of a certain culture (Kuklina & Cheremisinova, 2018).

The methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language is based on intercultural paradigm that assumes the interrelated teaching of language and culture. The multilingual space allows considering education as a cultural environment for interaction at the level of language, verbal and communicative competencies. In this regard, the methodological function of a multilingual culture in the context of educational space humanization makes it necessary to enter into creative interaction within the Humanities in order to achieve an effective dialogue.

The model of cultural synergy (Adler, 1980) recognizes the similarities and differences between national cultures, creating a new international organizational culture that relies on the cultures of its creators, employees, and customers. This is a combination of the best from different cultures to achieve the highest collaboration results (Table 01 ). The law of synergy states: for any organization, there is a set of elements in which its potential will always be either significantly greater than the simple sum of the potentials that make up its elements (people, computers, etc.), or less. Further, we represent some possible scenarios for the development of communicative relations in the business sphere.

If an organization has an authoritarian management style, the information, the level of interaction and the degree of diversity are on the verge of chaos as long as the organization manages the system and does not let the “chaos” of external world in. The type of informal communication “grapevine” begins to function immediately before any serious decisions are made (movements are chaotic), however, 75–95 % of the information transmitted through the grapevine is true (DeVito, 2013).

With competency-based and synergetic approaches, the student’s personality is the subject of history, an active figure, and education is the mechanism of forming the world image. Students at the stage of comprehension should present the teacher’s instructions in a comparative perspective, in which they could see the difference or common in “one’s own” and “alien” culture, as well as express a personal positive / negative opinion, or emphasize their neutral attitude to the discussed linguacultural fact.

In the process of mastering the Russian language, foreign students learn material that demonstrates language functioning in the natural environment, the native-speakers’ verbal and non-verbal behavior in different communicative situations and reveals the peculiarities associated with folk customs, traditions, social structure of the society, ethnicity. Therefore, the teaching aids are authentic materials – original texts, songs, audio / video recordings (Solovova, 2002). Thus, the knowledge acquired before is output to the level of awareness, becoming the basis for the new material assimilation. This enables foreigners to link more effectively new information with the previously known.

The success of students in all types of speech activity leads to the formation of a secondary language personality of foreign students, i.e. a person who contains psychic, social, ethical, and other components, but refracted through his/her language and discourse (Karaulov, 2010).

Let us consider the practical application of the technology “model of cultural synergy” at the lessons of Chinese students in Business Russian. Their training is built on three stages of technology – orienting, teaching and supervising. The main didactic principle is dialogue communication (Belousova, 2018).

Findings

In our opinion, an educational organization conducting purposeful work on the development of intercultural communicative competence should have specific mission, values and principles of interaction. The main effect that we need to strive for in the development of the ICC is acculturation, i.e. the assimilation by a person who has grown up in one national culture of the essential facts, norms and values of another culture. We adhere to this concept, although it was mentioned above that in a different interpretation, the process of acculturation is seen as imposing values from one culture to another, making many cultures lose their identity, uniqueness and get absorbed by other, more aggressive cultures.

While preserving national and cultural identity, it is necessary to cultivate respect for other cultures, tolerance, readiness for interaction and constructive overcoming of intercultural communicative difficulties. Psychological and pedagogical tools that contribute to this practice can be rather variable: from training to develop intercultural tolerance, communicative skills, self-expression in communication; methods to stimulate communicative creativity and the introduction of technologies for teaching spoken foreign language; to large-scale forms of educational tourism, interaction in the Internet space; holding of interethnic and interfaith social events; organization of joint projects, flash-mobs with representatives of different cultures (Chagina & Samokhvalova, 2017).

Each discourse statement can make sense in the context of a particular communicative situation. Certain strategies in interaction are conditioned by hidden cultural meaning and discover themselves in discursive practices – ways of thinking and information exchange, expectation of results in the process of communication. Speech interaction of interlocutors sets the scenario for discourse deployment when background knowledge demonstrates the mutual understanding of communicants’ cultural realities.

At the stages of encoding and decoding, there may appear interferences related to the level of communicants’ knowledge about the structure of these systems in real communication and the degree of owning its functional processes. For example, in deciphering messages, the student (recipient) may attribute a different meaning to the symbols and figures than the teacher (sender) because of his/her knowledge, skills, abilities and life experience. The so-called disintegration of interconnections occurs and leads to failures since “interferences, noise” in communication theory are associated with external factors distorting the message and breaking its integrity.

The interactive methodology is based on the interaction of two levels:

Conclusion

Based on the studies of the cultural synergy model in the formation of the foreigners’ ICC in business communication, we have concluded that possessing foreign-language code that allows successful intercultural professional interaction requires knowledge of “alien” culture and determines the specifics of its bearers’ social and business behavior.

Hence, the ICC acts as one of the indicators in the formation of secondary language personality. This statement is based on the position that “intercultural competence is associated with understanding the worldview of other socio-culture, cognition of the semantic guidelines in other linguoethnic society, the ability to identify the similarities and differences between communicating cultures and to apply them in the context of intercultural communication” (Galskova & Gez, 2006, p. 36).

The ICC level allows one judging the achievements of foreign students in mastering the Russian language as a means of business communication at the socio-cultural level and their ability to solve extralinguistic tasks in the language being studied, which becomes possible resulted from: 1) acquiring knowledge about the language picture of the world; 2) background knowledge revealed in the form of communicative associations and connotations, and being provided with standards of verbal communication in the process of intercultural interaction.

The dominant item of intercultural learning is the ability of a secondary language personality to analyze, compare, match and interpret the features of “one’s own” and “alien” lingua-societies implemented in the international business sphere.

Enriching the Russian language of foreign students is one of the important tasks of the methodology in teaching Russian as a foreign language. However, there are some difficulties in understanding and correct use of aphorisms by foreigners. Catch phrases, idioms, proverbs and sayings are fertile sources that should be used in various disciplines. The linguistic and regional orientation of teaching foreigners the Russian language allows using unrealized program material, to expand the cultural memory, vocabulary and language knowledge.

Thus, mastering intercultural communicative literacy, acculturation and harmonization of cultural interaction is the only way to overcome hostility, ethnocentrism and extremism in modern society, a source of intercultural integrative processes on a global scale.

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