Abstract:

The relevance of the article is caused by the need for elaboration of the wide variety of methods, approaches and technics to teach students in a non-linguistic university in their future professional activity to communicate effectively with the business partners from different cultures.

The challenges of current development of business process force foreign languages teachers more than never before to think about teaching not only language as such, but simultaneously about teaching the culture. This means that teachers should focus on the cultural diversity. It, in their turn, includes all parameters of culture as such: values, traditions, norms of behavioral, time perception, context, space perception, hierarchy, attitude to work and some others.

Evidently, it is a very difficult task to give an idea about the cultural diversity the students who never thought about the basic concepts of any culture, even about their own one, to encourage them to reflect and understand the motivation of action of different cultural agents.

Using the method of cross-cultural discourse analysis, the authors shortly consider the main theories of cross-cultural communication: by Edward Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaas and Richard D. Lewis. The authors create the idea of importance to develop communicative skills of management students, providing them with the knowledge of theoretical base of the issue. Afterwards, the authors describe their own experiences of developing the cross-cultural skills with 2nd year students of Economics Faculty and Institute of World Economy and Business at RUDN University. The authors outline particularly the issues have been discussed with students, the additional materials have been used in the lessons.

In the end of the article, the authors come to a conclusion about the necessity to management students to develop their cross-cultural competence, thus they inevitably will work in multinational companies, according to increasing globalization.

Keywords:

Cross-cultural competence, management students, multinational company, discourse analisys, communicative skills.