Innovation in Language Learning

The article investigates the teaching strategies aimed at the development of intercultural communication skills of students - future foreign language teachers. The analysis of the principles of the communicative and cognitive approaches to foreign language teaching helps to distinguish interactivity, situationality, cognition, problematicity and phasing as core principles to develop future foreign language teachers’ intercultural communication skills.

The above principles are the ground to determine a number of teaching strategies. Interactivity provides face-to face and mediated interaction between the participants of the educational process: the teacher, the students - future foreign language teachers, and the computer (by means of internet services, resources and web applications). Situationality ensures reconstruction of the conditions of intercultural dialogue, therefore a variety of situations of intercultural communication are suggested to use in the classroom. The principle of cognition contributes to the acquisition, structuring and operating of declarative and procedural knowledge. Problematicity stimulates communicative and high order critical thinking skills development by means of problem solving tasks. Phasing guarantees the dynamics of the teaching process at the stages of introduction into intercultural communication, training and practice in intercultural communication; as a result the student’s intercultural communicative competence is developing from the phase of “unconscious incompetence” to the phase of “unconscious competence” (W. S. Howell). The examples will illustrate the use of the teaching strategies in the future foreign language teachers’ intercultural training.