Abstract:

In the last decades, Russia faced fundamental reforms in its higher education system that alongside overall globalization processes and academic and professional mobility, resulted in a recent huge influx of students from abroad. The presence of foreign students in Russian universities proves the relevance of educational institutions, raises their rating and contributes to the involvement of Russia into premium international educational space.

Internationalization of modern higher education brings to the forefront the issue of foreign students’ adaptation to a radically different environment, to new academic reality, to the educational institution itself; thus, the significance of sociocultural competence development becomes increasingly obvious especially via the process of teaching foreign languages.

Modern academic background in a higher educational institution is undeniably multicultural one, especially in reference to national research universities; consequently, the conception of multicultural education within the sociocultural environment is of primary importance.
None of the elements of the educational process, either its content or the ultimate results, are free of cultural influence. Today we need to realize that teaching and learning processes are to be influenced by the most crucial values, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as the dominant communicative types and linguistic samples of culture. The levels of multicultural education range from awareness, mere tolerance, to acceptance and respect, which helps to meet various challenges in interethnic communication and overcome different troubles in poly-cultural training.

The process of education in the Russian national research university can result in certain adaptation incongruities for foreign students, especially Arabic ones, which involve development of stress and certain negative feelings related to a new assessment scale (5 point scale instead of habitual 10 point one); a big number of female lecturers which contradicts traditional academic gender balance in their own countries; huge academic workload, and even intensive study on Saturdays, which, as a rule, does not meet the expectations of foreign students. Though, as our experience shows, Arabic students have a rather good command of the English language which helps them to become more confident in themselves, show independence in their judgment, strive for domination in interpersonal relations, freely express their own opinions and defend their viewpoints. The principal motives for their behavior, in this case, are retaining their own dignity and promoting national interests, which is of vital importance for their national culture.

The introduction of sociocultural components into the academic curricula provides a purposeful stage-by-stage construction of the training system, which aims at molding secondary cultural-and-linguistic identity that is as open as possible to intercultural interaction.

While designing a sociocultural course for Iraqi students in the South Ural State National Research University (Chelyabinsk) we made every effort to select the most necessary and relevant functional background data, taking into account all above-mentioned peculiarities, the principles of developing sociocultural competence and awareness.

Keywords:

Internationalization, sociocultural competence, multicultural education, sociocultural course.