Multilingual museum project as a means of forming intercultural competence

The aim of the article is to prove the effectiveness of the implementation of the museum project Museum as a Translator of the Historical Realities of the Multicultural World in the process of forming the intercultural competence of students who major in linguistics. The competence-based approach was chosen as the methodological basis of the study. Methods of theoretical study, empirical knowledge, and statistical data processing were used. The experimental study was carried out as part of the study of the History and Culture of the Countries of the Studied Language discipline. The sample of subjects consisted of control and experimental groups - a total of 72 second-year students in the Linguistics training course (field of study). Based on the results of performing a series of diagnostic tasks (lexical substitution exercises, multiple choice tests and questions for written answers), students of both control (CG) and experimental (EG) groups stated a predominance of medium (50% CG, 47.22% EG) and low (8.34% CG, 5.56% EG) levels of proficiency in cultural information and lexical units within the framework of the subject under study. This necessitated the work on the formation of intercultural competence. As a method of formation, the effectiveness of which was supposed to be proved, the project-based method was used. Within the framework of the project Museum as a Translator of the Historical Realities of the Multicultural World, the following three museum projects were carried out on the premises of the Tula Branch of the State Historical Museum: Peter I in England, Durer and His Epoch, Faberge and Court Jewelers. The projects included excursions to museum expositions, lectures in English on the topics studied, interactive forms of learning (brainstorming, quizzes, translation assignments, etc.) using an interdisciplinary approach. The results of performing a series of diagnostic tasks similar to the ascertaining stage demonstrated that the dynamics of indicators in the experimental group was more pronounced than in the control group: the number of students at the medium level decreased from 47.22% to 2.78% in the experimental group and from 50% to 30.56% in the control group. The number of high-level students increased from 47.22% to 97.22% in the experimental group and from 41.66% to 61.11% in the control group. The increase in the level of proficiency in cultural information and lexical units within the framework of the topic under study and the statistical significance of differences between the compared values is evidenced by t(emp) = 7.2 according to Student's t-test. The study proved the effectiveness of the applied method in the formation of intercultural competence. An increase in the level of students' awareness of the relationship between the history and traditions of the countries of the studied languages was achieved; additional knowledge in the field of art history of the countries of the studied languages was mastered.