USING VISUAL REPRESENTATION TO DEVELOP INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE WHILE TEACHING ENGLISH IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In today's globalized world the university graduates in addition to strong academic skills are required to possess intercultural competence. Although intercultural competence has been defined in various theoretical models by intercultural scholars, there is an active search for the ways to implement educational activities designed to develop intercultural competence into the course of foreign language teaching at the level of higher professional education. To address this challenge, the authors analyze the existing ways to develop intercultural competence through teaching a foreign language and particularly by using visualization in the English language class. Existing culture has an obvious tendency towards visual, especially for its universal blazing-fast communication. The shift towards visual is gathering speed and the students should be ready to work with the visually loaded Web, social networks, mass media, and graphically sophisticated challenges at work. The leading approach in the study of this problem is the systematic methodological principle, which allows us to take into account a variety of factors and to exclude one-sidedness. The authors of the paper are trying to distinguish between active and passive visualizing (photos, graphs, infographics, and video) to develop intercultural competence in higher professional education. The research reveals that visual representation can be a helpful resource to build intercultural competence in a foreign language class alongside with other methods. The materials of the article can be interesting for a wide range of readers dealing with the problems of intercultural education and practical ways to build it in a class.