Intercultural Communication and Teaching a Second Language in Russia

The paper analyzes the problem of teaching a second language in Russia with the help of techniques of intercultural communication. For the purpose of this paper we define teaching a second language with the help of intercultural communication as a strategy of successful teaching, based mostly on the social-geographic and mental and emotional approaches. We built up a system of teaching a second language based on the principles of motivation, tolerance, emotional state, patriotism, cultural value, reason and usability. We suggest the system of persuasion; a manual which helps to reach goals; a system of methods and techniques which enables people to use the colossal abilities of human brain. This issue is of great importance at the current moment since Russia is reinforcing its international positions and is active in developing collaboration with foreign countries. For successful negotiations we need specialists whose knowledge would not be limited by the knowledge of the English language only but they would also be well informed about the social cultural aspect of a partner. This is true not only when we talk about the business side of life; in friendly conversations cultural knowledge would only add up to the communicative purpose of the interaction. Despite the fact that a great breakthrough in the theory of communication has been achieved by many researches this knowledge is not widely used in many spheres of our life. And one of such spheres is definitely teaching. In the paper we will try to answer the question how to implement the techniques in teaching process in forming intercultural communication competence so as to make training programs more successful and productive. Our own 7-year experience of exchanging trainees with the Teaching Training Institute in Dijon (IUFM, Dijon) attests to the importance and success of our methods.