The Cultural Potential of the Video as a Means of Developing Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence

Since the world and all its population has been absorbed by globalization, the importance of interacting with foreigners and studying the peculiarities of foreign cultures has soared as well. Therefore, studying only the foreign language, related to the culture, is deemed insufficient when it comes to the task of becoming more culturally aware, since in order to achieve this task, a person also needs to gain knowledge about the mentality of its people, their habits and manners of speech and conduct. On account of the ineptitude to spend enough time abroad so as to fully understand the way of life of the people living in the target country, one needs to resort to a different way of gaining that particular information, i.e., by watching authentic videos, which equals to having the vicarious experience of being in the country and looking at its people through the screen of a projector. Those means are best taught in a school with a teacher who is able to make the material devoid of all the unnecessary information and create exercises based on the video, which are supposed to raise the productivity and efficiency during the lesson. The study at hand aims to provide the analyses of the videos that are able to boost students’ cultural awareness by looking at the context of the video, its language, and the sociocultural peculiarities, along with designing the tasks accompanying those videos. The results may help boost the idea of including such videos into the lesson program and making them overall more culturally-oriented.