The Evolution of the Multicultural Approach to Foreign Language Education in Domestic Education at the End of the 20th–Beginning of the 21st Centuries

At the end of the 20th century, against the background of rapidly expanding political, economic and socio-cultural cooperation between Russia and Western countries, interest in learning foreign languages increased. The country needed specialists who could quickly become involved in international cooperation in all fields of activity. However, the need to prepare for intercultural communication revealed the insufficiency of existing approaches to teaching a foreign language, and the grammatical and translation orientation of the educational process required a significant transformation in order to ensure the formation of students' communication skills and knowledge about the culture of the country of the studied language. Rethinking the goal-oriented priorities of the discipline "Foreign Language" led to the development of new approaches to teaching a foreign language, an important of which was the multicultural approach. The paper characterizes the economic and socio-cultural factors of the emergence of a multicultural approach to teaching foreign languages, analyzes state documents that have consolidated the need to expand the cultural component of the process of learning a foreign language, gives a theoretical description of multicultural education, highlights its components, principles, interpretations of the multicultural approach, analyzes its role in obtaining cultural knowledge about the country of the studied language, necessary for productive international cooperation, implementation technologies are shown. The main provisions of the concept of multicultural approach by V.I. Mathis, as well as the concept of linguistic multicultural education developed by P.V. Sysoev, are studied. Attention is drawn to the functioning of various educational organizations that contribute to the development of multicultural education. The methods of teaching are called, the implementation of which will contribute to the formation of not only language skills, but, no less importantly, information about the culture of the country of the studied language on the indispensable basis of knowledge about the native culture. The authors conclude that the implementation of a multicultural approach to teaching foreign languages will contribute to the development of multicultural thinking, humanity, tolerance, respect for other cultures, which will become the basis for successful interaction in a global society.