Critical thinking as a premise for the intercultural competence development

The intercultural orientation of education at the present stage is dictated by the objective conditions of the socio-economic and political context of the current century. Intercultural communicative competence is one of the main aspects of professional competence of a specialist. The intercultural orientation of language education is embodied in the objectives of the modern stage of development of the theory of teaching foreign languages. Language today is considered as a special tool for creating and interpreting the “image of the world”, which provides the opportunity to “penetrate” into world culture, as well as the individual’s awareness of their national and cultural identity, which in turn contributes to the formation and socialization of the student’s personality. Such an understanding of the language, as well as the specificity of intercultural communication leads to the need to consider intercultural interaction from the perspective of mental processes. It is thinking that, being the highest stage of human knowledge, allows one to gain knowledge about such objects, properties and relations of the surrounding world that cannot be directly perceived through sensory perception. Thinking is an integral part and a special object of self-consciousness of a person, the structure of which includes understanding oneself as a subject of thinking, differentiation of “one's own” and “other’s” thoughts, awareness of an unresolved problem as one’s own, awareness of one’s attitude to the problem. Critical thinking involves performing certain mental operations along with affective personality parameters. An analysis of intercultural communication from the perspective of cognitive personality parameters allows us to conclude that these parameters correlate with cognitive processes that form the essence of critical thinking and state the need for their interconnected development in the process of forming students' intercultural competence