Culturally conditioned communicative failures: culture-text-interpretation
The article presents an attempt to analyse the emergence of conflictogenic factors which in the context of linguistic-cultural polyphony and the inevitable asymmetry of the communicants’ discursive styles in the cross-cultural space, often entails communicative failures associated with violation of the principle of communicative rapport. Differences in presuppositions and conventions of communication, which determine accepted and acceptable forms of expression of certain socially significant meanings, together with insufficient background knowledge in the field of culturally-based scenarios represent a risk zone irrespective of the communicants’ proficiency level in a foreign language. The author also dares to claim that the current development of cross-cultural sensitivity proves the dominant of the university graduate’s professional competence, and training in a foreign language is immutably bound to incorporate purposeful modeling of the communication process to prevent the very occurrence of communicative discomfort. Developing appropriate communicative behavior in the course of realizing communicative intentions in cross-cultural communication puts before a foreign language teacher a number of professional and ethical questions on how to equip students with knowledge of strategies to minimize conflict communicative situations. In the view of pragmalinguistics, the teacher is to be aware of the language and non-language mechanisms that enable students to optimize understanding of a foreign language text.