The development of students’ sociocultural competence in English at linguistic higher educational institutions

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of teaching sociocultural competence in the target language to students learning English for professional purposes. The point of the issue is that the most effective way of teaching creative, culturally determined social communication in the target language a more fruitful approach to teaching a sociocultural competence is based on taking into account the linguistic, speech, psychological and psycholinguistic difficulties experienced by Azerbaijani students who learn English for developing communicative purposes. Language learners’ attention should be concentrated on similarities and differences between two cultures and dynamic nature of social interaction. Teaching should be done to master language university students’ sociocultural skills in productive communicative skills. The teacher’s role will be to encourage and facilitate the application of individual learning in social settings, bringing groups of learners together to put them through their paces.

One of the main components of a communicative competence as well as linguistic, discursive and strategic competences is a sociocultural competence.

It should be noted that the formation of the sociocultural competence implies with the formation of verbal behavior norms, non-verbal behavior norms are adopted among the native speakers. One of the significant factors contributing to the success of communication is the use of participants of the target language. It should be noted that today at all stages of teaching English as a specialty the main attention is traditionally focused on teaching the language system despite the urgency and importance of the problem of the sociocultural component formation of the communicative competence.