DEVELOPING INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AT FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSES AT NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENGLISH

Abstract

The increasing use of English as a language of global communication raises additional questions in the course of its teaching. The article explores the necessity to make changes in the process of learning and teaching English, which should be built from the point of view of intercultural pragmatics. Development of politeness strategies is an important aspect of improving intercultural communicative competence of university students, which is illustrated by examples of such speech acts as a request, conditional/hypothetical threat and conditional/hypothetical promise. The article draws attention to some misconceptions that may arise due to inadequate interpretation of the results of intercultural research and argues that in order to establish which politeness strategies should be used in the context of global communication, the focus of intercultural research should be shifted from the study of linguistic and cultural differences to the study of linguistic and cultural similarities.