Abstract:

Modern education on all its levels develops and functions within the framework of intensive world integration processes that create multicultural setting. The efficiency of intercultural communication is determined by the ability of individuals with different national, ethnic etc backgrounds to understand, decode and uncover meaning of different cultural phenomena.

Various cultural codes become a barrier in education. They construct a large and flexible body of meaningful generalizations represented as symbols. The inability to implement symbolic methods and decoding tools leads to misunderstanding of relevant information. Misunderstanding brings either denial or false perception that is created in accordance with one’s worldview.

That is why teaching students to make correct assumptions about cultural phenomena is crucial to overcome cultural barriers in education. We combine two different approaches to this problem (semiotic and cross-cultural) in teaching one course (“Social psychology”) to undergraduate students.

The semiotic approach is aimed at enabling students to create a mental chart that allows them to use a system of cognitive strategies relevant to different cultures. It helps to build the logic of studying an object according to the context of its functioning. As part of the semiotic approach students learn various ways to code information and discover that different cultures may use externally similar coding tools but give different meaning to the symbols. Types of symbols and ideograms as well as the degree of their involvement in practice are determined by psychological characteristics of cultures as different cultural languages represent the specifics of cognitive functions externalized in sensory and operational activity models.

The cross-cultural approach dwells, first, on teaching students to differentiate between personal and cultural phenomena (mainly social practices) and make correct assumptions accordingly. Secondly, it focuses on uncovering cultural values and implementing universal constructs to compare the aforementioned phenomena. Students were taught culture dimensions theory and learned to analyze social practices from different cultures using culture dimensions.

Empirical research conducted by the authors shows the efficiency of implementing two approaches to overcome intercultural barriers in education.

Keywords:

Intercultural barriers, education, semiotic approach, cross-cultural approach, multicultural context.