A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AS A TOOL OF INFORMAL LEARNING AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

Foreign languages have become nowadays a major social issue, an individual challenge for people wishing to enter the internationalized and rapidly changing labour market: a major challenge for nations in their attempts to regulate migration flows. In this context, an individual should speak at least one foreign language. The French language plays a vital role in the world today as it is spoken on all continents by about 274 million people. It is one of the six official and one of the two working languages of the United Nations, as well as the official or working language of several international or regional organizations, including the European Union. The French-speaking community symbolizes cultural, linguistic and political diversity. Preserving this plurality is a challenge today. In this context, appeared the idea to create a French-speaking environment uniting French citizens, nationals of former French colonies, students and pupils, studying the French language as well as foreign students from European countries speaking French as a foreign language - the French-Russian Friendship Club "POCIDELKI" of RUDN University which embodies the values mentioned above. The Frenchspeaking area of POCIDELKI has become a place of exchange and intercultural dialogue in a nonFrench speaking area. In this article the authors analyze the role of the French language aimed at communication between students, representing different countries, cultures, societies and religions. The object of the article is to prove that studying a foreign language in an informal atmosphere in a multicultural club can be very effective. The authors implement the comparative analysis and other empiric methods of quantitative estimation.