DEVELOPING INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: CHALLENGES AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES

In the era of globalized communication, English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca, shifting the paradigm of English Language Teaching (ELT) from pure linguistic mastery to the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC). This paper examines the critical importance, ongoing challenges, and pedagogical strategies for integrating ICC within the higher education landscape of Uzbekistan, specifically focusing on future media and journalism professionals. Drawing upon Michael Byram’s foundational ICC model, the study utilizes a mixed-methods approach—combining content analysis of current local ELT curricula with a diagnostic survey administered to 45 undergraduate students and semi-structured interviews with 6 language instructors at the Uzbekistan University of Journalism and Mass Communications. The findings reveal a critical structural imbalance: 72% of current pedagogical tasks focus exclusively on grammatical accuracy, while 64% of linguistically proficient students fail to decode pragmatic cross-cultural subtexts. The study proposes an empirically validated framework incorporating culture-based tasks, reflective learning, and the integration of national-cultural codes to cultivate globally adaptive communicators.