Intercultural Activities in Teaching Foreign Languages: Modern Ukrainian Dimension

Abstract

The article covers the issues related to implementing intercultural events into teaching foreign languages to Ukrainian university students. Against the backdrop of the requirements set by the Bachelor Educational Programs learning outcomes, the main aim of this research is to investigate how the integration of international work and methodological tools of teaching foreign languages to Ukrainian students can contribute to their academic success. The significance of the study manifests itself through the analysis of the methodological background for successful teaching foreign languages to Ukrainian students under current transformed teaching/learning conditions. These questions are considered: How can culture-related activities contribute to learning foreign languages? What learning outcomes can students have? The authors used the context and research tools as follows: the methods of systemic and content-oriented analyses to analyze and generalize the theoretical bases for the topic under study, to systemize the results of the survey (education-based intercultural activities, students' learning outcomes); focused observation using the register as a tool for data collecting for two semesters each in six groups of second-year students majoring in Philology and Lingua Didactics at Ushynsky University. The authors presented a sum of main findings: contribution of the programs of distance-based academic mobility to the teaching/learning process; internationalization of the educational process; adaptation of a criterial corpus for assessing Ukrainian students' learning acquisitions in English, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean in terms of linguistic and cultural knowledge and skills. The article contains recommendations for English, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean online and offline classes.