The article emphasizes the growing importance of intercultural communication, especially in education. It defines culture and outlines its constituent categories, focusing on differences in linguistic communication—general variations in vocabulary and grammar, prosodic factors, and certain body-language features across cultures. Because human interaction involves more than linguistic dimensions, the discussion also touches on religion, value and attitude disparities. The authors propose initial steps to raise cultural awareness among all participants in intercultural communication and suggest ways to internationalize curricula to succeed as an international institution. Internationalization of education is not merely the exchange of students and teachers; the article highlights common challenges and offers advice on how our university integrates culture into teaching and learning.

The role of audiovisual materials in teaching Russian as a foreign language is considered in this article. The author describes the advantages of the use of audiovisual materials at the lesson. Types of audiovisual materials are defined and the criteria of their selection for teaching use are established. The author considers that the use of video at Russian lessons facilitates the work on new lexical and grammar material, allows expanding the thematic range of the lesson. The outstanding role of video for the obtaining by trainees of the language and cultural competence which is necessary for adequate communication in Russian is shown in the article. It is confirmed that the inclusion of video in lesson structure widens the cultural background of the lesson and provides the way to acquaint trainees with Russian communicative behaviour, with mimicry and gestures of Russians. Moreover, the use of video raises motivation to studying Russian, focuses students on search of additional information on the subject matter of an audiovisual material, makes the lesson more interesting and lively, provides active participation of each student in discussion of problems in a situation most closely approached to the conditions of real communication in Russian. On the example of a concrete Russian lesson for foreigners the author shows the mechanism of inclusion of the certain audiovisual material chosen by the teacher and reveals the specific character of its methodological development for a learning purpose and presentation in view of both complexities of the video- and audiotext, and age of pupils and the level of their practical language knowledge. In the article the expediency of use of graphic texts of phonograms is emphasized, and besides that the author assures that the additional texts thematically connected with the video are also a very important part of the learning process. The author comes to the conclusion that successful use of audiovisual material at the lesson in the course of Russian as a foreign language first of all depends not only on the right choice of the video intended for viewing, but also on the carefulness of its methodological development by the teacher.