Socio-cultural competence in the cultural dialogue
context
In the process of interlingual communication,
sociocultural competence is formed that is according
to D. Drl
íková “an ability to communicate in a language
appropriately, situationally and culturally, the knowledge
of customs, rules, beliefs and principles of a given
society” [17]. Cross-cultural communication generates
such qualities as tolerance, patience, impartiality towards
the representatives of other countries and cultures.
The dialogue of cultures implies the knowledge of
one’s own culture and the one of the target language
country, having cross- cultural awareness. Culture is
understood not just as art, which is also a part of cul-
ture and reflects it but as everything that people have,
that people think and that people do in any society,
everything that determines specific life styles, their
national mentality, religion, language, habits, cus-
toms, mentality, material treasures, spiritual values,
etiquette, everyday small situations, models of behav-
iour, taboos. Culture emphasises the fact that people
from various speaking communities take their specif-
ic roles as speaking social agents which may shed
light on the repertoires of their language use, linguistic
practices, and even the social formation [2, p. 97].
The concept of culture includes three constituen-
cies: 1) information / factual culture, which includes
the background information: geography, history, a po-
litical situation; 2) achievement culture, which includes
arts, sciences, literature; 3) behaviour culture which in-
cludes mentality, spiritual values, verbal and non-ver-
bal communication, people’s relationship [5].
Cross-cultural differences can relate to patterns
of meeting, bringing up children, getting food to feed,
gaining information, social control and avoiding an-
archy, organizing a nuclear family, etc. The require-
ments of intercultural communication make it neces-
sary to form a global mindset among its participants,
which implies possessing the following skills: identify-
ing false stereotypes leading to incorrect conclusions;
determining the problem essence and alternative ways
of its creative solutions; understanding what’s critically
important and what’s merely a detail; perceiving that
simple and excessive generalizations, categorizing
people, unproved suppositions are far from always ac-
curate and can lead to the stereotype formation; avoid-
ing categorical statements; being honest in reasoning.
Possessing general global mindset teaches students
to process information more accurately, to make more
balanced and correct conclusions about a representa-
tive of a particular cultural group, make objective eval-
uative judgments about cultural phenomena without
prejudice and distortion.
Thus, possessing socio- cultural competence is im-
portant as it helps to form a global mindset and cross-
cultural awareness among the participants of cross-
cultural communication, trains a person to successful-
ly operate sociocultural knowledge, contribute to the
dialogue of cultures and learning cross- cultural differ-
ences.
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