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Global Partners in Education Journal                                                                                              April 2011, Vol.1 No.1, pp. 8-12 

 

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Teaching through Technologies:  
Communicative and Information Competences 

 
Alla L.Nazarenko 

 
Ludmila G. Sizykh 

 
Victoria A. Fandei 

 
Faculty of Foreign Languages 

Lomonosov Moscow State University 
 

Abstract 
 
Communicative and information competences are considered essential 
for the information society. The competence-developing approach was 
suggested by the Council of Europe (2001) and can be applied to 
learning and teaching any foreign language. The Global Understanding 
project, described in this paper, is a testing ground for this 
methodology. The experience gained in Moscow State University 
(Russia) showed that the preparation of students for communication 
with their foreign counterparts should be enhanced to achieve higher 
effectiveness of the Project. As a solution the creation of a supporting 
site with resources and tasks for students is suggested and discussed. 

 

Introduction 

The process of globalization of the contemporary world is intensively and extensively 
going on. Interactions in economic and political spheres, in the field of education, 
science and culture are deepening; the area of interaction is broadening, covering 
new spheres of activities and new regions of the world. 
 
Millions of people are involved in communicating with others, willingly or under the 
force of circumstances. They all need the tools for communication, the skills to 
handle it, and to be able to express themselves and achieve their goals in a world 
with a new configuration and new characteristics. 
 
The main tool of communication is language. For communication in a multilingual 
world a common language, a lingua franca, is necessary. Today the English 
language is recognized to be the language of international communication. So, 
nowadays, knowledge of English is more or less a must. 

 

Competence-developing Approach 

But we also know very well that for successful communication with a foreigner it is 
not enough to have a shared language. It is also necessary to know the cultural 
peculiarities of his/her country or region. And vice-versa.  As Ter-Minasova (2004) 
emphasizes in her book, Language and cross-cultural communication, “To ensure 
cross-cultural communication one should not only know the language but also be 



Global Partners in Education Journal                                                                                              April 2011, Vol.1 No.1, pp. 8-12 

 

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aware of the system of communicational culture, rules of etiquette, forms of 
nonverbal communication and have deep background knowledge of values and 
perceptions accepted in other cultures” (for example, of religious beliefs, taboos, 
public and historic facts, etc.) (p. 34) 
 
This statement is in agreement with the concept of “plurilinguisme” which has 
recently become dominant in the approach of the Council of Europe (2001) to the 
issue of studying languages and which, certainly, can be extended to non-European 
parts of the world, due to the overall tendency to integration in a globalized world. 
 
According to the Council of Europe (2001), plurilinguisme is not multilinguisme, 
which can be understood as knowing several languages or the co-existence of 
several languages within a given community. Plurilinguisme occurs with the 
extending, in a cultural aspect, of the linguistic experience of an individual from the 
language used in the family to the language used in the society and further to 
mastering languages of other peoples (learnt at school, in college or in a genuine 
language environment); an individual does not ‘store’ these languages and cultures 
separately but shapes a communicative competence on the basis of  his/her total 
knowledge and the whole of his/her linguistic experience, where all languages are 
interconnected and interacting. According to the situation an individual uses a part of 
this competence to ensure successful communication with a certain counterpart. 
 
From the point of view of these ideas, the goal of linguistic education changes. Now 
a “perfect command” of one or two, or even three languages, taken separately from 
each other, is not any more the goal. The goal is the development of a linguistic 
repertoire where all linguistic skills are presented. In other words, the development of 
communicative competence is now considered to be one of the main categories of 
communicative linguistics and foreign language teaching. 
 
The analysis of contemporary scientific and academic literature makes it possible to 
conclude that communicative competence is an interdisciplinary phenomenon which 
does not have a clear-cut definition. In the most general way it can be defined as the 
creative ability of an individual to make use of an inventory of  language means (in 
the form of statements and discourses) which is the combination of his/her 
knowledge and readiness for their adequate application. 
 
It is also emphasized that while communicating in a foreign language one uses a 
number of competences, including both language competences proper and non-
language ones. Language competences proper are well known to all involved in 
Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) and comprise linguistic, sociolinguistic and 
pragmatic competences.  
 
Non-language or general competences include one’s awareness of the outside 
world, obtained from life experience, education or from some other sources, such as 
socio-cultural and intercultural knowledge and skills. The latter is usually described 
as the ability and capacity to compare one’s native and foreign cultures, the ability to 
flexibly use various strategies to establish and maintain contacts with representatives 
of other cultures and efficiently avoid misleading and conflicting situations, 
caused/provoked by cultural differences. And also to overcome existing stereotypes. 
 



Global Partners in Education Journal                                                                                              April 2011, Vol.1 No.1, pp. 8-12 

 

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The GU Project as a Touchstone of a Competence Theory 
 
All these seemingly theoretical and purely didactic aspects came to the fore in a very 
pragmatic way in a cross-cultural project “Global Understanding” initiated by East 
Carolina University (USA) (http://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/globalinitiatives/course.cfm), 
in which Moscow University has been participating for over 5 years.  
 
Students of different cultural backgrounds come to “meet” their counterparts from 
various regions of the world, having no special socio-cultural or cross-cultural 
knowledge of their partners’ society. They usually have only general ideas about the 
“other” cultures, based on information obtained by them from various sources and 
these ideas could vary very widely. Due to direct communication with their partners 
in the project they extend and correct their perception of their counterparts’ countries 
and cultures and acquire special socio-cultural and cross-cultural knowledge. They 
use their partner-students as a learning resource. Precisely because of this, the 
resource (or source of information) must be adequate, relevant and reliable. 
 
It is equally true for both parties involved in communication. 
 
However, our 5-year experience has taught us that, without special preparation, 
Russian students rather frequently can not provide reliable information about their 
own culture and country (Nazarenko & Sizykh, 2009). This might be the result of a 
faulty school education (the Russian system of secondary education is still in a state 
of flux after the collapse of the Soviet Union) or because usually the students 
enrolled in the course at our university were only in their second year and lacked the 
necessary knowledge. 
 
Anyway, their partners might have been given less than adequate ideas about the 
cultural uniqueness of our country on the basis of the information they received from 
our students. (Perhaps this was a two-way street?) 
 
Consequently we introduced some changes to the program to prepare our students 
for more efficient and fruitful participation in the project. It was decided to enforce the 
cognitive side of it by including purposeful self-preparation for every class, guided by 
a teacher. A special “supporting” resource-site was created in the MOODLE system.  
 
The learning content is organized on a modular principle, each module containing an 
informative text on the subject to be discussed, sample questions for students to ask 
their partners during the link, tasks aimed at mastering thematic vocabulary and 
preparation of a short text/essay providing additional interesting information (found 
on the Internet) about their own country and pertaining to the subject under 
discussion. Sometimes the task would include making a Power Point presentation, 
which would visually demonstrate this or that fact about Russian culture and life on 
which the student should comment.  
 
Thus, the students get reliable information from the text, which they could use as 
reference material and as an initial basis for their discussion, where they will be able 
to operate with facts and checked information. In other words, they get socio-cultural 
knowledge about their own culture which could prompt them on what to concentrate 
on when asking their partners about their native culture. That is, it can provide them 



Global Partners in Education Journal                                                                                              April 2011, Vol.1 No.1, pp. 8-12 

 

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with a starting point for acquiring similar knowledge about the culture explored. This 
sort of “mirror reflection” can help see more clearly the similarities and differences in 
the cultural backgrounds of the communicating parties.  
 
Besides, it contributes to their improving their English, which for them is a second 
language. They acquire knowledge of semantic fields of the words referring to 
certain spheres of human activity and they plan and design their speech strategies 
according to various situations of communication. They purposefully extend their 
linguistic knowledge to fulfill their communicative task, which promotes the 
development of language competences proper, and which, together with general 
competences, develops the communicative competence of the participants of the 
project. 
 
Shaping and developing communicative competence is recognized to be the final 
goal of linguistic education. The ability to communicate in a native and foreign 
language(s) is defined as a basic, key competence of a human being living in the 
XXI century, in a globalized world, in the information society.  
 
It should be noted that the Global Understanding project brings together participants 
from all continents with the help of and via information and communication 
technologies (ICT). The spread of ICT is another world tendency of our time and 
awareness in the field of information technologies or information competence is also 
qualified by the Council of Europe as one of the key competences. 
 
Information competence is a combination of readiness and necessity to work with 
modern sources of information in professional and everyday spheres of human 
activities and also the skills: 
 

■ to find needed information using various sources, including 
contemporary multimedia means; 

■ to find out the level of the information’s reliability/novelty/significance; 
■ to process information in accordance with the situation and tasks; 
■ to archive and store information; 
■ to use information found to solve a wide range of tasks. 

 
Studying in a virtual classroom students acquire information competence by 
definition. They are actually immersed in an information environment. They 
permanently work with technologies. They get connected with their counterparts via 
chat, they work with search engines looking for information which they need to 
perform their tasks, they process the obtained information in accordance with the 
task, they save it, transfer it via e-mail, they know how to work with a word 
processor, navigation system and programs for creating presentations. 
 

Conclusion 
 
Due to the course Moscow State University students of English as a Foreign 
Language specializing in Cross-Cultural Communication have a wonderful 
opportunity to use their theoretical knowledge and improve their language skills in 
virtual (looking like real!) communication via videoconference with their foreign 
partners. But it seems that they need more purposeful preparation for the project to 



Global Partners in Education Journal                                                                                              April 2011, Vol.1 No.1, pp. 8-12 

 

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be really effective. Introducing additional work via technologies made it possible to 
intensify students’ acquisition of all competences relevant for effective 
communication. These competences are considered to be the basic ones for the 
people of the Information Society. 
  

References 
 
Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for 

languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR). Retrieved from 
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf 

 
Nazarenko, A., & Sizykh, L.. (2009). From interpersonal international communication 

- to global understanding. In F. Meng, T. Xu, W. Feng, R. C. Chia, & E. Poe 
(Eds.),  Proceedings of the 2nd GPE Annual Conference, Beijing, China, 10-
14. 

 
Ter-Minasova, S. (2004). Language and cross-cultural communication. Moscow, 

Russia: Moscow State University. 
 
 
 
 

About the Authors 

 
Alla L. Nazarenko is a PhD, full professor, Head of the Department of Linguistics 
and Information Technologies, Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and 
Area Studies Lomonosov Moscow State University. She lectures in British History 
and Culture, Theory and Practice of Distance Education.  A Fulbright Alumnus and 
an author of about 70 publications (including a monograph and textbooks) on 
linguistics, functional stylistics, ESP, Russian as a Foreign Language, Cross-Cultural 
Communication, Distance Education and E-learning. 
Website:  http://anazarenko.ffl.msu.ru/ 
E-mail: anazarenkoster@gmail.com 
 
Ludmila G. Syzikh is a senior teacher at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and 
Area Studies Lomonosov Moscow State University, teacher of Global Understanding 
course.  Area of interests: intercultural communication, distance learning, EFL 
E-mail: lsyzikh@gmail.com 
 
Viktoria A.  Fandei is a post-graduate student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages 
and Area Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Graduated from 
Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area 
Studies, in 2009. Area of interests: intercultural communication, EFL, blended 
learning, distance learning.  The theme of her thesis is “Blended learning as a means 
of enhancing the learning process in foreign language teaching”. 
E-mail: insatiable_in@mail.ru 


