INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND LEARNING SPANISH

This article focuses on experience analysis of the development of intercultural communication between Russian and Hispanic students at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in the context of studying the Spanish language, as well as on the presentation of a special teaching methodology that uses intercultural communication as its basic element. Students' real life communication in a foreign language relieves not only psychological stress; it also performs a certain educational function, which is directly related to the acquisition of a spoken language, specific idioms and expressions inherent to a particular foreign language. Intercultural communication creates additional opportunities for simulation of a specific cultural environment at the level of interpersonal communication with native speakers from a particular cultural environment, promotes students' better familiarization with behavioural patterns inherent to such speakers. Intercultural communication cannot be limited to informal communication; it should be of a broad cultural scale, which requires foreign language teachers to do a large amount of work to get native speakers involved in conducting classes and various cultural and educational activities and projects where students could better interact with each other. The method of complex foreign language teaching (mentioned in the article, and Spanish in particular) outside a certain cultural environment requires artificial simulation of such environment, where multilevel and multifaceted intercultural communication plays a significant role. According to the authors, the modern world on the whole has become much closer and more accessible thanks to the development of information and other technologies, growing number of academic exchanges and increased financial solvency of people, but this has also revealed new problems in using new achievements and new opportunities in specific realities of teaching a foreign language. Students' familiarization with foreign cultural environment, their communication with native speakers, should have an appropriate methodology related to the purposes of the learning. The authors present the methodology in this article.