Promoting Azerbaijani Students’ Intercultural Competence through Distance Education of Foreign Languages

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to determine the advantages and disadvantages of distance teaching and promoting Intercultural Competence in learning foreign languages in the Azerbaijani higher education system. Nowadays the growing tendency of remote education proves that, education has become more reachable in comparison to the past decades. At the same time, distance education has brought new demands and regulations to the education system. The COVID-19outbreak has necessitated the online teaching process resulting in specific problems, including the maintenance of interaction in online teaching. Thus, this study explores both benefits and drawbacks of teaching foreign languages through distance learning in Azerbaijan. In this research, a quantitative research method in the form of a survey has been utilized to explore the tendency of teaching intercultural competence in foreign language classes at universities. Finally, it may be concluded that distance education provides enormous opportunities to practice intercultural communicative competence by using modern information technologies and does not differ much from face-to-face learning.