Psychological and educational conditions for the formation of the sociocultural competence of students in a non-linguistic university

Abstract

The key issue of the article is the experimental proof of the effectiveness of psychological and educational conditions for the formation of students’ sociocultural competence in a non-linguistic university (this is evident in the case of the Institute of Humanities of the North Caucasus Federal University). The sociocultural competence of students is understood as an integral quality of the individual, representing the totality of knowledge, socially significant skills, personal qualities, practical experience, determining the value of the professional activity to the future specialist. The key aspect of the paper is the structure and essence of the sociocultural competence. The cognitive, activity-oriented, and personal-sense components of the sociocultural competence are defined. The primary concern of the paper are the methods of sociocultural competence components’ diagnostics. The most prominent diagnostics methods are the evaluation of foreign language activity, linguistic and communicative test tasks, scales of levels of knowledge of intercultural competences developed by E.L. Kudriavtseva and I.V. Korin. The results of the research showed that, besides the increase of the knowledge component of the sociocultural competence,the students of the experimental group increased their ability to apply knowledge about the traditions, values and norms of the country of the studied language in their foreign professional communication. The students found personally relevant the adoption of the phenomenon of another culture. The conclusion is made that competence-oriented methods and technologies of teaching the cultural orientation provide for the effective formation of structural components of students’ the sociocultural competence in a non-linguistic institution