WAYS TO OVERCOME INTERCULTURAL BARRIERS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

This article presents ways to overcome intercultural barriers in the English language classroom through designing additional teaching materials about British culture. The article presents the results of a pedagogical experiment on the implementation of these materials into the educational process. The experiment involved 10th grade students and English teachers from Gymnasium 147 in Almaty. The following themes were tested during the experiment: «Eating in Britain», «Holidays», «Modern families», «Making friends with Westerns», «Art connects people from different cultures». The elaboration of supplementary materials was carried out taking into account the level, age, needs and interests of the pupils. Modern methods and approaches such as «Flipped classroom», «Project technology», and «Role play» were used to overcome intercultural barriers in English lessons. During the conducted pedagogical experiment we can note that the more students are exposed to a foreign language culture, the more naturally they communicate with foreigners. Moreover, knowledge of the culture of the country of the target language enables students to think in a foreign language. Keywords: foreign language education, culture and language, intercultural communicative competence, mediator of intercultural communication, modern approaches and methods, intercultural barriers