Abstract:

Nowadays the need to educate a new generation, capable of efficient cooperation with various ethnic and cultural backgrounds becomes urgent. Researchers have looked carefully at the purpose of FLT to develop in the students the competence which will allow them to be engaged in communication with the speakers of a foreign language. It means that we have to go beyond mere speaking and listening skills and ensure that the students have linguacultural and sociocultural competence which is really instrumental for communication with native speakers. Thus, the students have to learn to develop a strategy for oral and written communication in a multicultural environment in which English is employed as the primary language of communication. In order to develop linguacultural and sociocultural competence we need to understand its constituents, thus facilitating its mastery by the students. Area Studies, though being treated as an element of linguacultural and sociocultural competence, is currently viewed as a complex field of study which aims at summarizing the information on the nature, population, economy, society, language and culture of a given nation or nations, and transforming this information into actionable data. Thus the paper dwells upon Area Studies as the subject to provide the students with new information on the county or countries the language of which they learn, thus encouraging them to use the language the way it works in real-life situations and authentic spoken and written speech.

Keywords:

Multicultural society, area studies competence, cross-cultural communication, sociocultural environment, linguacultural and sociocultural competence.