DEVELOPING HIGHER SCHOOL STUDENTS' CROSS-CULTURAL AWARENESS AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE THROUGH PHRASEOLOGY

One of the challenges of higher education in the context of 21st century globalization is to prepare students for intercultural communication that will facilitate their success in a competitive work environment. A culturally diverse global workplace in this digital era requires effective interactional skills as in many occupational contexts, professionals' poor communicative performance which is conditioned by the lack of cross-cultural understanding of their partners, might result in the failure of international collaboration. The present paper focuses on the specific role of phraseology in developing both cross-cultural awareness and communicative competence. This layer of vocabulary, represented by a system of stable multiword expressions with partly or fully transferred meaning reflecting conventional metaphorical cognition of the world, serves as an indicator of a person's fluency and efficiency in using a foreign language. Native speakers have a lifetime of exposure to their own language and culture that helps them understand figurative speech and make an abundant use of idiomatic expressions without any difficulties in various spheres of activities including everyday speech. However, the complex nature of these lingual units, predetermined by their culture-based etymology as well as structural and functional-semantic peculiarities, makes their teaching and learning processes problematic and challenging. The author of the paper offers a brief survey of the research that has been carried out on the material of the English and the Georgian languages, the former as a lingua franca, the latter being one of the ten most ancient languages of civilization still spoken and functioning as an official, state language in the country of Georgia, which is situated at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. The results of the comparative analysis of the empirical material showed that, despite great typological and cultural differences between these two languages, both of them share a considerable number of identical and semi-identical phraseological units that are motivated by the universal nature of mental, cognitive processes and sense perception of humans. However, the majority of English and Georgian phraseologisms are represented by unique expressions that embody ethno-cultural and psychological peculiarities of their creators. The paper assumes that the generalizations made in the paper and the recommendations for teaching phraseology will facilitate developing higher school students' cross-cultural awareness as well as their communicative competence.