Significance of nonverbal compensatory component for improvement of intercultural communication skills of non-linguistic students

When we communicate, we use different tools to codify the message we want to transmit. At pre-school and primary stage of education we can use dancing, mimicry, gaming to teach nonverbal communication. As far as higher school is concerned, unfortunately, we cannot say that there are large resources of studies in teaching nonverbal communication in foreign languages. This paper is aimed at showing importance of such nonverbal forms as gestures, facial expressions, postures to improve intercultural communication skills of non-linguistic students. For efficient communication with English-speaking interlocutors we have to consider differences in our cultures as the same nonverbal signs may be interpreted differently by people from different cultures and even bring us to communication break down. In order to prevent misunderstanding in communication or even its break down, it is necessary to teach students not only grammatical patterns, vocabulary etc., but to pay attention to peculiarities of nonverbal means of communication in different countries. Unfortunately, the limited amount of hours for foreign languages in a nonlinguistic university does not allow teachers to do this to full extent. However, even those small activities we manage to provide in this aspect, make some contribution to improvement of our students' intercultural communicative competence.