Abstract:

Today tolerance is a fundamental universal principle the world, in general, and the individual community, in particular, should be based on. By the beginning of the XXI century, the ethnic component of tolerance has come to be of particular importance. A great role in breeding tolerance is played by education. The present day system of Russian education has to meet this challenge and to offer diverse ways of solving the problem of forming students’ tolerance. The authors of this study present their own teaching technique of students’ tolerance formation in multiethnic environments in EFL class. Role play has been chosen as a teaching method of forming students’ tolerance in EFL class. Literature review allowed the authors to find out that a lot of scholars nominate role play to be an effective method in teaching foreign languages, although role play has not been implemented as a tool to educate tolerance in EFL class so far. 78 students from two Kazan gymnasiums ranked among 100 best schools of Russia volunteered to participate in the experiment. Study materials and instruments aimed at forming students’ tolerance in multiethnic environments in EFL class were investigated. The copyright questionnaire made it possible to reveal and select tolerance features that assisted the researchers to build up the role play plots. The authors came to the conclusion that role play contributes to determining the behavior of a single representative of the ethnic group in multiethnic educational environments and to developing his arbitrary behavior. The experiment, conducted in this study, validated the authors’ hypothesis that role play can significantly affect the exposure of the national character of its participants for role play creates an emotional-and-psychological background manifestation of the national character. Role play plots can be used in EFL classes, although all of them can be adapted to better suit the needs and interests of students.

Keywords:

Arbitrary behavior, ethnic component of tolerance, multiethnic educational environments, role play, tolerance features, tolerance education in EFL class.