April 2021, № 2 (230), pages 109-114

doi: 10.25198/1814-6457-230-109

Yankina N.V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSES AT A UNIVERSITY AS A WAY TO FORM THE INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE OF STUDENTSMulticulturality of the modern world assigns a special role to teaching foreign languages in higher education institutions: a future specialist is to get a high level of foreign language knowledge and skills as well as to learn how to use them to meet the challenges of professional communication with representatives of different cultures. To face these needs a university student is to develop intercultural competence, by which we mean a set of special knowledge necessary for intercultural dialogue, appropriate orientations that will ensure personal interaction based on understanding, respect, tolerance and interest to the values of another culture and a set of skills necessary for intercultural communication. While forming these abilities we should acknowledge that modern information technologies provide students with access to massive amounts of information and this charateristic of professional training actualizes the development of critical thinking skills — comprehension, analysis, systematization and evaluation of the acquired knowledge.
Theoretical and practical studies on the correlation between cross-cultural competence and critical thinking allowed us to formulate the requirements to the assignments’ content aimed at developing critical thinking skills during foreign language classes: it is important to provide students with the opportunity to introduce them to the realities that are extra to their own experience and to diversify their intercultural interactions’ scenario.
Observations about the changes in the students’ communicative and cultural activities led us to the conclusion that critical thinking stimulates the development of such important intercultural competence skills as multicultural awareness, readiness to learn cultural diversity, positive reaction to different viewpoints, formulating hypotheses and making assumptions about partner’s behavior and selecting an appropriate personal behavior model after identify similarities and differences, drawing independent and objective conclusion. Key words: critical thinking, intercultural competence, foreign language knowledge and skills.

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About this article

Author: Yankina N.V.

Year: 2021

doi: 10.25198/1814-6457-230-109

Editor-in-chief

Sergey Aleksandrovich
MIROSHNIKOV

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