Филологические науки / 7. Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

Chibisova Olga Vladimirovna

Komsomolsk-on-Amur State Technical University

SHAPING Students’ SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCE for world cooperation

Abstract: The article is devoted to the actuality of teaching intercultural competence to Masters of technical and economic professions for effective economic and cultural cooperation with other countries.

Key words: learning English, sociocultural competence, intercultural collaboration.

The globalization of the world economy objectively requires the reinforcement of controlling principles, which leads to the emergence of international economic organizations. Geographically, their activities may cover both all the world economy and its individual regions. In this regard, international economic organizations can be subdivided into universal and regional.

The main goals of these organizations are promoting effective collaboration in economy, trade and politics, technology and science, education and culture, transportation, energy, tourism, and etc. The participant countries make joint efforts to ensure security, stability and peace in the region. They are committed to move towards the establishment of a just political and economic multinational order. The parties intend to cooperate on issues of food and energy security, energy efficiency and combat climate change and natural disasters. The versatile activity of international economic organizations involves in its orbit a lot of people. We would suggest that a large majority of these people do not have special training for cross-cultural collaboration, although the implementation of any educational Master’s program of technical and economic trends, according to the standards of the third generation, is impossible without the implementation of its humanitarian component in general and a language one in particular.

General cultural competences constitute a significant portion of the total amount competencies, for example: 39% in Trade business, 38% in Technological machines and equipment, 30% in Economics, 25% in Applied Informatics. We should add that many professional competencies of masters, especially in the sections "organizational and management activity" and "research activity" are also based on the idea of the sociocultural education. Among them there are such competencies as the ability to work in a multicultural environment; the ability to organize the performance of staff, the ability to develop strategies of the behavior of economic agents in various markets, the ability to organize and conduct negotiations with the customer and to carry out consultations in companies and organizations [4]; the ability to use information resources and international standards in the informatization of enterprises and organizations.

This is due to the fact that in the present period of the globalizing world economy it is necessary for a modern specialist to combine professional skills in a particular field of activity with a comprehensive education and personal development. In order to operate successfully in a multicultural space, a person must not only be deeply aware of his/her native culture, but also understand and accept other cultures. In this case, the competence of a specialist is considered as the level of his/her general culture, attached to their professional activities. That is, the formation of the competence of Masters is inextricably linked with the assimilation of certain socio-cultural experience.

It is well known that language is the carrier of culture and at the same time the means of its comprehension. But learning a foreign language in a technical or economical university is reduced mainly to students’ mastering a grammar and vocabulary minimum which is necessary to read and understand scientific and popular texts on the chosen specialty. It is not intended to familiarize students with the universal and specific features of national mentality and behavior of representatives of their own country and the country of the target language (to say nothing of the neighbouring countries!), which, in turn, negatively affects the readiness of the future specialist for effective cross-cultural collaboration.

This explains why a new standard of higher education equates the level of foreign language knowledge to that of native language. It also makes clear that it is not enough to possess a certain amount of linguistic, cultural and socio-cultural knowledge. Highschool graduates must have formed abilities and skills to adequately express themselves in situations of intercultural business communication. To illustrate the above we can quote the excerpt from the Standard: the graduate should have the ability to make free use of Russian and foreign languages as a means of business communication.

But effective business communication as a dialogue on equal footing is based on the understanding how the geopolitical position of the country affects its economy and traditional ties, the knowledge of its main historical stages of development, religious beliefs, traditions and values [1], that is, the social competence of communicants. It should be noted that the formation of social competence should not mean the formation of a global view of the world alone. In the elaboration of the basic education programs there have been taken into account the state and development prospects of foreign economic relations of both Russia as a whole and its regions, in our case, the Far East. The requirements of the regional labor market strongly dictate the need to train specialists who are able to interact successfully with our partners in SCO and BRICS.

To our mind, first of all students should be taught to comply with the basic rules of communication, applied to all kinds of human interaction. Here we can mention the cooperative principle introduced by Paul Grice, which is divided into four maxims: the maxim of quantity (be as informative as you possibly can), the maxim of quality (be truthful), the maxim of relation (be relevant), the maxim of manner (be perspicuous) [2]. According to, there is a politeness principle with conversational maxims similar to those formulated by Paul Grice. Geoffrey Leech formulated a politeness principle, which contains six maxims similar to those of Paul Grice: tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy [3].

These two theories are often disputed by arguing that most social behavior is culturally determined, and therefore the maxims should not be universally applied because of intercultural differences: what is polite in one culture may be rude in another. It goes without saying that that every people of the world has its own cultural, religious, ideological and historical traditions, which affect the specific behavior during international political and economic, scientific and cultural contacts. So, the culture of what country should be chosen as an object of study?

Traditionally, English textbooks contain linguistic-cultural material about 5 English-speaking countries - Great Britain, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But Professor David Crystal OBE, one of the world's foremost authorities on language, states that current estimates suggest that 1.5 billion people speak English with only about 400-500 million native speakers [4]. It is thought that one out of four people worldwide speak English with some degree of competence.

In business communication with the representatives of different cultures, speaking different languages and using different writing systems, international economic organizations also resort to English as intermediary language. As a global language because of its breadth of operation, the English language also contributes to mediate intercultural communication through the processing of information materials on the history, culture, politics and economy of the countries. It should be borne in mind that the main barriers are an inaccurate interpretation of non-verbal sighs, different perception of time and space, prejudices and stereotypes [5].

For example, the phrase "at about 6 o’clock" for the Russian informants denotes the period from 17.30 to 18.30, which covers a wide range of time, allowing the vibrations up to half an hour, both before and after the appointed time. With regard to the Chinese respondents, it indicates a period from 17.55 to 18.05, i.e. the time interval of 10 minutes. For representatives of Chinese culture the concept of "after lunch" is a literal (after I have eaten), and for the Russians it means after 13-14 o’clock [6].

On this basis, it is appropriate to include in the disciplines related to the study of a foreign language by Masters of technical and economic specialties ("Business Foreign Language", "Professional Foreign Language", "Foreign Language") a number of tasks, which reflect the characteristics of dialogue with the people of SCO and BRICS. Such a presentation of the material will not only perfect students’ language skills, but also will give them an idea about the culture and peoples of SCO and BRICS countries at the present stage.

References

1. Чибисова О.В. Обучение студентов межкультурному общению со сверстниками // В сборнике: Августовские педагогические чтения - 2014 Сборник материалов международного научного e-симпозиума. под ред. проф. И.В. Вагнер. Киров, 2014. С. 175-188.

2. Grandy, Richard E. and Warner, Richard, "Paul Grice", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) / URL: http //plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/grice/ (дата обращения: 8. 12. 2015).

3. Leech, G. N. Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman, 1983. 250 pp. / URL: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/.../10366 (дата обращения: 14. 01. 2016).

4. Current estimates suggest that 1.5 billion people speak ... / URL: www.davidcrystal.com/?fileid=-4038 (дата обращения: 17.01.2016).

5. Lupashko K.D., Chibisova O.V. On the Intercultural Communication Trainings // Международный студенческий научный вестник. 2015. № 4-4. С. 583.

6. Каминская И.В., Чибисова О.В. Время в межкультурной коммуникации // Вестник Воронежского государственного университета. Серия: Лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация. 2012. № 2. С. 159-161.