Teaching intercultural communication through mental and upbringing values in action

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen”
Ernest Hemingway

“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstance they want and, if they can’t find them, make them”
Georg Bernard Shaw

“Discoveries are often made by not following instructions;
by going off the main road; by trying the untried”
Frank Tyger

 “The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I want to thank everybody , who made this day necessary”
Yogi Berra, 1925, baseball player, coach and manager

“What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, or sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight; and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully”
Victor Cherbulies, 1829-1899, Swiss novelist and critic

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”
Ralf Waldo Emerson, ibid.

“Saving represents much more than mere money value. They are the proof that the saver is worth something in himself. Any fool can waste; any fool can meddle; but it takes something more of a man to save and the more he saves the more of a man he makes of himself. Waste and extravagance unsettle a man’s mind for every crisis; thrift, which means some form of self-restraint, steadies it”
Rudyard Kipling

Having read all these witty phrases, we clearly understood how much they have in common with our main ideas of teaching, connected with intercultural and multicultural approach to teaching as a prolonged process of enlightenment The more we teach and learn in the field of education as the sense of people’s existence. Not less… The more we teach and learn the process, it’s fulfillment and our own inner intellectual and moral growth, the more we appreciate mental and upbringing values, constructing and forming the process of educating.

The role of a teacher is very hard to overestimate. He (She) is everywhere and in every situation in need, in expecting the right solution and a good result. That is why one of the significant advice may be: Don’t force someone to remember you all the time. Just stay silent and let them realize how will they be without you in their life. It is the very truth about the role of good teaching when we, teachers, take into account, that our present situation is not our final situation. All our work is our good will, responsibility and duty to improve the situation in order to improve the very process of learning for our students.

The first rule is like this: Taking Action! Start by doing the necessary, then the possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible, as Francis of Assise ever said. And it is right. Working with the audience is the first task, especially when the audience are your students. The teachers must know a lot about them, their interests, fears and doubts in accordance with the level of their knowledge, their aim concerning learning at all and goals in everyday practice, their dreams connected with the choice of their future profession. So, it is important for effective communication to ask the students to list five topics for short papers that would be interesting to them but probably not to their teacher. Then they may list five topics that they think would be interesting to their teacher, but that are not particularly interesting to them. The students ask their teacher to agree or disagree with their selection of topics. The scheme looks like:

A. Five topics that interest me but that don’t interest my teacher:

B. Five topics that I think my teacher would find interesting:

As a result, the students use memory in writing, focuses on finding code words, words, that identify broad areas or topics one can search through looking for information to shape into a subject.

Listed below are twelve possibilities that may be code words for you (as a student).

It looks like that: Topic Evaluation – yes or not [1, p.31].

In our pedagogical experiment, we proposed that the student should compare and discuss two texts in order to answer the questions about their own blended teaching through blended education. The core of the task was to find out as many interesting rational and logical questions, answering which could help students to get all answers interested and creating. So,

The text number 1.

I am a poet and I spend a large part of my life travelling around the world. I have a laptop computer, which means I can work on trains and buses, wherever I happen to be. My poems always begin in a notebook (and I mean the paper variety) where they stay for a while, moving from notes I have made, sometimes just individual words and phrases, to more developed pieces. The only way I can keep in touch with my family and also stay in contact with other writers is by using e-mail. Actually, I also use e-mail for sending work – poems, articles, reviews – to magazines, publishes and newspapers. Through my PC I am in constant communication with writers all over the world and we can swap poems and ideas within seconds. It’s brilliant.

The text number 2.

I love computers. I owned one of the early laptops and today I have both a PC and a laptop. My life as a freelance musician would be a real struggle without my computers. I have to run myself like a small business, and I simply wouldn’t be able to do that without a computer. You have to keep in touch with music agents, concert promoters and conductors, and there are lots of letters to write. I use my computer to send out information about myself each week by e-mail. I can ever send a picture of myself that way too. It saves a lot of money on stationery, stamps and so on. I also keep all my accounts up to date on it and use the internet to research new music. The other thing I love about having a computer is that being a professional musician can be a solitary business because you spend a lot of time on your own at home. My e-mail is like having a friend in the flat [2].

It is especially important today to think about our future for generations of those after us. That is why the English language in active communication teachers and students lets us to give all to what is present maximally effective. The modern educational system proposes the reasonable modern students should adapt themselves to the world, not the world to themselves. All new approaches to English learning can arise creativity of those taught. It is great that all our thoughts and ideas about good teaching the foreign language have much in common with those well-known educators of the world. When we ask our students about their imagination concerning creativity as necessary and demanded students’ approach to learning new information and transforming it into their real life, they answer approximately “word in a word” as S.I.Hayakava, 1906-1992, American educator ever wrote: “Creativity is the act of bringing something new into the world, whether a symphony, a novel, a supermarket or a new casserole. It is based first on communication with oneself, then testing that communication with experience and reality” [3, p.180].

While searching for new approaches, we organized a wide testing of the students and teachers in order to compare their answers and find out common items of concern being the core of the problem’s solution. The testing was based on the ready answers, proposed as main ones for both categories of those being tested. The analysis of the material was very fruitful and let the teachers to have new information concerning new approaching to learning English. It looked as a formed base of new some problem-solving skills and dealing with charge we consider being the most important in the process of teaching as a whole:

• I can identify problems and propose positive solutions;
• I can find and use a range of information from different sources;
• I can distinguish between facts and opinions;
• I can evaluate different solutions to a problem and select the best one;
• I can be positive when faced with a new situation that is difficult;
• I can show I have the strength to adapt to a major charge;
• I can imagine a Program of Action;
• I understand what it means to possess problem-solving skills and dealing with responsibility (charge) curriculum. [4, p.189].

What effects do flexible approaches to learning have on English teaching? What effects do flexible approaches to teaching have on English learning?

A key component in professional excellence is teachers’ research strength. Not all teachers consider this item of high teachers’ qualification mark obligatory, necessary for everybody in the teaching sphere at the beginning of their practice, but in the process of inspired working. It is the main approach.

All approaches are rational and effective when the students share teachers’ views and help realize all planned tasks and solve key problems in common communication of an active activity. The role of students becomes especially valuable when they are involved in the educational process as a whole through their contribution to developing courses and shaping the learning experience. In a real practice it means their frame of knowledge in special disciplines of humanitarian and technical sciences may be involved in a material being learned at the English studies (special texts translated into English, as well as humanitarian or technical projects, essays, reports, elements of qualification work’s defense in English and many elements of group work, etc.). Testing of different levels and kinds lets teachers and students recognize and approbate a method of leadership through learning and discussing the approaches as the best common findings of getting and using knowledge.

It means teachers’ great attention to necessity of arising the students’ intellectual possibilities, emotional opportunities, logical vision of the problems’ development in the direction of solution, feelings, leading or lead orientation in communication, type of personality, degree of skills and habits of communicative integration in small and big groups. Group sharing is encouraged. Paying into attention the main personal first achievement as formal education, teaching must let the student’s opportunity of answering the life exam questions on all directions of personality’s establishment in society’s reality. Skilled optimistic, innovative, effective and psychologically correct English teaching and upbringing is a core of an innovative education in our highly skilled effective activity in the contemporary world.

Teachers’ conferences are very urgent today, especially in the modern world of contradictions. The conferences help people to see education that empowers young people to question, to develop their minds and skills set, to make choices, to find meaningful employment and to play constructive roles in their families, their communities and their nations. We want to see education that enables young people to value other human beings, encourages them to understand the importance of equality and equity and helps them recognize the importance of collective responsibility and action [5, p.21].