English Intercultural Tutorial for University Students Majoring in Japanese

Abstract

This paper is the first attempt to present the implementation results of the language-learning tutorial based on intercultural and communicative approaches in a classical university in Ukraine. The authors present a new tutorial method for teaching English at Departments of the Far East Languages in Classical Universities of Ukraine. This method is aimed to facilitate the acquisition of essential aspects of knowledge about a country as a regional and cultural subject as well as to improve students’ English speaking and conversational skills. The experimental research involved 2nd and 3rd year university students majoring in the Japanese and English languages. The authors proposed the original design of the tutorial to be used both for English speaking practice and as a part of the course content. Considering the psycholinguistic peculiarities of Ukrainian students to percept and understand the English and East Asian languages, the tutorial under review stimulates students’ cognitive activity during the English learning process and when developing sociocultural competence with regard to the Far East. Compare and Contrast activities in the English language classroom can create a favourable learning environment resulting in students gaining knowledge and acquiring skills necessary for proficient English users. At the same time, they get the opportunity to pick up more information about Japan using the sources about the country available in the English language. The ability to categorise and compare things in terms of their differences and similarities corresponds to the main stages of cognitive development. Compare and contrast as teaching and learning strategies can be applied when teaching monologic and dialogic production, in particular when discussing similarities and differences of cultural, natural, geographical, historical, political and art objects of Ukraine and Japan. In this article, the interdependence between the use of the tutorial method and academic achievements in English speaking competence has been proved, since the students have significantly improved their speaking fluency in English about the Far East.