MEDIATION AND MEDIATIVE COMPETENCE: THE ESSENCE OF THE CONCEPTS AND THEIR STRUCTURE

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to prepare learners for cooperation in multilingual and multicultural educational environments, which involves not only mastering a foreign language as a means of communication, but also preventing intercultural misunderstandings, resolving conflicts, and performing effective mediation activities. Accordingly, particular importance is attached to the concepts of mediation as a type of communicative activity involving interaction between people, languages, cultures, and various forms of information representation, and mediative competence as the ability that enables such activity. At the same time, the lack of clear differentiation between these concepts, the absence of a unified approach to the structure of mediative competence, and the need to clarify the representation of the mediative component in national educational standards confirm the relevance of the research topic in the context of contemporary educational realities.
The aim of the article is to specify the content of the concepts of mediation and mediative competence, to analyse scientific works addressing their structure, and to identify the components of mediative competence.
To achieve this aim, theoretical methods were applied, including literature analysis and synthesis (to identify the structure of mediative competence), as well as systematisation and generalisation (to formulate the definitions of “mediation” and “mediative competence”).
The phenomenon of mediation is interpreted as a process of facilitating interaction between interlocutors in order to convey meaning and ensure understanding. The term “mediative competence” is defined as the ability of an individual to perform intra-lingual, interlingual, and intercultural mediation in the course of communication to ensure mutual understanding between participants, as well as between individuals and various forms of information representation (textual, numerical, visual, audio, tabular, and digital) through interpretation, paraphrasing, and summarising of message content.
The structure of mediative competence includes the following components: linguistic (use of lexical and grammatical means); communicative (adaptation and paraphrasing of messages); organisational-managerial (coordination and facilitation of interaction); sociocultural (knowledge of traditions, value systems, and behavioural norms); reflective-emotional (emotional self-regulation and neutrality in communication); and pragmatic (effective mediation activity).