THE ROLE OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN TEACHING POLISH STUDENTS TO BUSINESS RUSSIAN
Nowadays, the teaching of Russian in Poland goes through a difficult period - on the one hand, it is connected with political and economic transformations along with the reform of secondary and higher education, on the other hand, it falls under the influence of a pragmatic attitude toward the learning of the Russian language that the Poles show. That is why more and more students are choosing for such speciality as “Business Russian” to study not only communication in business but also the target language culture. The specialists with intercultural competences gain importance on the job market. Modern enterprises are functioning globally and employ people from different cultural background who have to find a common language and cooperate with each other. For these purposes, speaking a foreign language is insufficient, the employees should be open-minded and try to understand each other and a somehow different behavior -not to disapprove but to understand and accept. Taking into consideration the notion of “teaching the intercultural communication,” we mean a teaching process in which at least two cultures arise. The objectives of this process and its content cannot be described regardless of the pedagogical processes being unified due to the orientation of “the teaching of intercultural communication” to the development of intercultural communication skills. The subject matter of teaching is own and foreign cultures along with their interaction. During interaction with other cultures we experience both differences and similarities with our own culture, and this is a natural process of getting to know each other and learning from each other. However, more attention during the teaching process is paid to the cultural differences, and the similarities that can help to establish the right relationship remains undiscovered. The author strongly believes that not only cultural differences but rather the similarities of such closely related cultures as the Polish and the Russian should be exposed. As mentioned above, the author presents some differences and similarities to be observed in the Polish and the Russian cultures, which play a very important role during teaching of Business Russian to the Polish students. In this paper, the analysis is based on the classification approaches to culture proposed by famous researchers.