Cultural self-awareness in the globalized world

Abstract

Today we can hear the terms such as “soft skills”, “core competences” and “global skills” from every potential employer who is seeking for a person to work in the global business environment. Globalization penetrated into all spheres of our lives. All financial operations, services and business connections cannot be imagined without cooperation with foreign partners. Even if the company works within one country, it is very likely that the team is international. With all this cultural diversity it became extremely important for modern graduates to acquire global awareness. The idea of global awareness and intercultural awareness has been thoroughly studied by numerous scholars among which are J. Beneke, M. Byram, E. Bandura and others. However, they did not consider cultural self-awareness as an independent concept and only viewed it as a part of intercultural competence. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to study cultural self-awareness as an independent context and suggest the ways of its developing in the course of English learning.