Abstract:

Nowadays one can’t efficiently communicate with representatives of different countries without cross-cultural competency, that means ability to participate successfully in cross-cultural communication. The article is devoted to researches on ways to develop cross-cultural competency among students of Economic Faculty with interdisciplinary approach to organization of a training course “Guidelines to Cross-cultural Business Communication”.

Business communication implies ability to establish and develop business network. It is crucial for cross-cultural partnership that involves professionals from different occupational areas. To communicate successfully in multicultural environment means adequate communicative behavior when establishing professional partnership. Here we need to emphasize, that high reference level of foreign language is not enough to achieve this. In addition, one needs to be able to adequately interpret and accept socio-cultural variety among partners while dealing with practical tasks. Therefore, any specialist training program requires special attention to a linguistic persona (identity) formation among students, a persona that possesses skills of cross-cultural communication.

Cross-cultural business competency development can be carried out in different ways, but anyway it should be comprehensive, multi-faceted and person-centered. One of modern trends in teaching, interdisciplinarity, can be helpful in achieving this objective as it is aimed at widening scientific view of the world and considering any concept as not limited by one single scientific subject.

Interdisciplinarity of a training course can be defined by interrelations between several sciences and subjects, maximum flexibility of the content and high rate of teacher’s autonomy in terms of choice among teaching forms and methods. The content of such training course should be determined by cognitive and age peculiarities of target students, logic of course delivery, scientific preferences of a teacher, and requirements to learning outcomes.

Applying both above-mentioned concepts (cross-cultural business communication and interdisciplinarity) we’ve developed an interdisciplinary training course on “Guidelines to Cross-cultural Business Communication”. The article gives a description of the course content and special aspects of its delivery to students of different economic specialization.

Keywords:

Cross-cultural business communication, interdisciplinarity, cross-cultural-competency, linguistic persona, teaching methods.