Abstract:

The growth of multicultural education environment is a ubiquitous process in higher education of the 21st century. Recent times have witnessed the rising popularity of polycultural education. Studies of neighboring peoples' culture should contribute to development of feelings of equality, dignity and moral culture of international relations and establish a cultural dialogue between representatives of different nationalities. Polycultural education of would-be teachers should have such components as motives and values; cognition; emotions and judgements.

An object of our research is the process of polycultural education in higher educational institutions and the potential of a new CLIL methodology in the process of polycultural competences formation. The main research methods are both theoretical methods:
a) the analysis of normative documents on education was used to justify the urgency of the problem and determine the legal possibilities for its solution;
b) the theoretical and methodological analysis allowed to formulate the key initial positions of the research - the position of CLIL methodology in higher education;
c) system analysis was the basis for a holistic review of the problem;
and empirical methods:
a) generalization and analysis of effective international experience and practice of domestic and foreign higher schools in the polycultural education;
b) the focus group method was used to elucidate students' attitudes towards the formation of polycultural competences in the implementation of the CLIL methodology.

The purpose of the paper is to present the possibilities of CLIL methodology implementation in the framework of the polycultural education which can be easily integrated into classroom activities. The authors identified the features of the education process in the polycultural environment as well as the reasons and ways of overcoming typical difficulties in the formation of communicative competence in a foreign language. Polycultural education focuses on creation of conditions for social and cultural identification of a person, stipulating his/her status in an intercultural dialogue and providing the person with primary experience of cultural studies. These processes can be realized by means of CLIL methodology.

The authors developed educational programs in the framework of three basic models of a foreign language course using the CLIL methodology:
- Expansion of language education - one or two hours a week are devoted to working with materials on individual topics of a subject or several subjects.
- Modular teaching - at various stages of the educational process, modules for studying a single or several subjects in a foreign language are included.
- Partial merger with the subject - up to 50% of foreign language classes are conducted in the format of the CLIL methodology. The content of the educational material can help revise or supplement the material studied in the main lessons on the subject.

The conclusion of this research is that the developed educational programs based on CLIL methodology were successfully introduced into an education process and changed the learners’ motivation and attitude for the better. The results of placement and final tests reliably show a significant improvement in the way the students use the language after they have mastered the basic skills.

Keywords:

Polycultural education, CLIL methodology, educational programs based on CLIL methodology, modular teaching.