PROFESSIONALLY ORIENTED MEDIATION COMPETENCE OF PROSPECTIVE FOREIGN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE TEACHERS

Abstract

It has been established that mediation competence promotes effective communication by enabling the mediator to convey meaning and achieve communicative goals within a specific social context, with due attention to cultural specificities. It has been found that professionally oriented mediation competence corresponds to the notion of a “global competence,” whereby future specialists not only integrate professional knowledge and skills for working with materials to achieve communicative aims, but also develop and refine the necessary language skills in conditions of real intercultural communication. The professionally oriented mediation competence (POMC) of a prospective teacher of foreign languages and cultures (FLC) is a significant component of their language training and successful professional activity, where language competence functions as an important precondition for high-quality mediation. A primary condition for forming mediational competence among students of philological–pedagogical programs is a sufficient level of mastery of skills for operating with linguistic and linguo-sociocultural material, as well as of the main types of speech activity. The relationship between mediational competence and pedagogical mediation is considered here as the ability to communicate successfully in both direct and indirect formats using the foreign language (FL) in situations of pedagogical communication. Tasks aimed at developing POMC in professionally oriented speech are presented.