Culture-Focused Teaching of Language and Translation

This article considers certain aspects of achieving cross-cultural communicative competence by university students through culture-oriented studies of English. It describes the principles of culture-focused tuition and their implementation in the development of teaching materials using the example of a series of practical English textbooks for future linguists and, specifically, translators developed at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Various forms of class work and self-supervised student work are discussed which ensure students take an active role in the tuition process via team work and individual work, as well as the development of responsibility for their own tuition, and the build-up of skills for self-supervised work. Rigorous selection and use of authentic, up-to-date, high-quality verbal and audio-visual material is described as an essential component of creating teaching resources. Language resources should be not only authentic: they must reflect the contemporary state of the English language, focusing on typical usage and differences between variations of the English language. The article describes such assessment from the points of view of the style of texts in terms of grammatical correctness, modern or obsolete vocabulary, typical or untypical usage, stylistic colouring, the number and quality of stylistic devices and other such criteria. The article also reviews the progress of cognitive studies in linguistics and their relevance for, and impact on, the methodology of language teaching. It discusses recent achievements in cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics as the basis for culture-focused tuition strategies, aimed at the development of cross-cultural communicative competence, which must be understood as a conscious and pro-active mastering by students of certain communicative strategies and tactics of verbal behaviour in a foreign language environment.