BILINGUAL INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION AS AN IMPORTANT PRECONDITION OF PROVIDING THE EFFECTIVE INTERCULTURAL INTERACTION IN THE AMERICAN MULTINATIONAL SOCIETY

Abstract

American scientists see the introduction of multicultural education, in particular bilingual intercultural education, as one of the promising ways of ensuring the effective intercultural interaction. The purpose of the paper is to analyse and summarise the ideas of the American experience of bilingual education as a means of ensuring the effective intercultural interaction in a multinational state. Methods of the research used: analysis and systematization of pedagogical works, which made it possible to identify conceptual considerations on the bilingual intercultural education as an important precondition of effective intercultural interaction; observations and practice of author’s teaching experience used to reveal the main aspects of the issue under consideration. Scientific novelty lies in the substantiation of essential characteristics of bilingual intercultural education and its role in ensuring of intercultural interaction in a multinational society. Bilingial intercultural education is a deliberate process of engaging in the world culture by means of native and foreign languages, when a foreign language acts as a means of knowing the world, acquiring of special knowledge, mastering the cultural, historical and social experience of different countries and peoples. For domestic science and practice, it is advisable to use the ideas of foreign experience of bilingual intercultural education. We consider bilingual intercultural education as such an education organisation when it becomes possible to use more than one language as a language of teaching. The second language is thus not only an object of study, but also a means of communication and a language of teaching. The main difference between bilingual intercultural education and traditional education is that the language of teaching itself is not only a tool for teaching and learning, but also its purpose.