INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENT AS ONE OF THE MAIN OBJECTIVES OF BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSE

The present research is devoted to the problem of intercultural communicative competence development in the Business English course taught at University American College Skopje (R. N. Macedonia) and at the Ural State Pedagogical University (Russia). The relevance of this research is in the necessity of intercultural communication skills development while learning the basics of business communication in a foreign language as such kind of communication presupposes its realization in the sphere of international relations. However, the aims of the analyzed courses, devoted to business communication in a foreign language, do not contain statements connected with the competence mentioned above, but consider the process of education only from the point of view of developing or improving linguistic skills and the necessary communicative skills in traditional sense (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Thus the object of our research is the process of intercultural communicative competence development together with its constituent skills, as well as the subject of the research is to organize the content and methodological components of the educational course on business communication in international relations. The paper outlines the theoretical and methodological basis in regards to the intercultural communicative competence and its constituent skills development in a Business English course. The contribution of each author in this research is the following: I. Trajanovska - 50%, D. Starkova - 50%. The research suggests that the development of intercultural communicative competence and its constituent skills in a university course, devoted to business communication in intercultural interaction, will be more effective if real collaboration with students of foreign universities is offered. To realize this idea the Business English International project was elaborated including a combination of normal course of Business English with online international collaboration between two universities, the aim of which is to study the business situation in the country of the partners. The project realization scheme includes regular classes interspersing with online conferences of students - partners in parallel having individual online meetings to collaborate on mutual projects in pairs and present the results at the end of the course. This will strengthen the Business English course and make perspectives of international collaboration in the business sphere for students real.