Formation of Cross-cultural Competence of Prospective English Teachers

The article substantiates the importance of forming prospective English teachers’ cross-cultural competence. Nowadays, education focuses on cooperation and establishing cross-cultural relations between the representatives of diverse cultural societies. Therefore, it concentrates on forming a personality capable of absorbing and reproducing verbal and non-verbal information during dialogical communication with foreign negotiators. This paper aims to validate the category “cross-cultural competence of a prospective English teacher,” develop its structure and experimentally verify its effectiveness. The study establishes that cross-cultural competence covers linguistic, sociocultural, activity, and axiologically-emotive components. The authors used the following theoretical research methods: analysis of philosophical, lingua didactic literature and scientific studies, synthesis, comparison, concretization; empiric methods: questionnaire-diagnostic (survey, testing, summative assessment, interview); analysis of speech activity products (spoken replies); lecture attendance and analysis; pedagogical experiment; methods of statistical treatment and experimental results analysis. The research on the training peculiarities of future English teachers based on cross-cultural grounds allowed us to conclude that the experimentally-verified methodology is effective. The practical data analysis points out the rise of forming cross-cultural competence levels in the experimental group. The reason is the cultural enrichment of linguistic material and the revelation of contrastive aspects.