Abstract-The aim of this paper is to consider project based learning as one of the most efficient and productive methods used in teaching English as a foreign language to engineering students of Russian technical universities. Special emphasis is put on communication skills to be mastered by future engineers through project based learning. It is of great importance to note that highly developed oral and written communication skills are valuable for engineering students wishing to become successful and competitive in the international arena. Hence, engineering students must be trained well to develop their communication skills in English in the field of professional activity, mainly in the science research area. An inter-disciplinary project designed on the basis of project based learning for the second year students of Tomsk Polytechnic University is reviewed in this work. The authors come to the conclusion that project based learning is an ideal teaching method since it allows engineering students to improve significantly their oral and written communication skills as well as apply the content knowledge in the field of their professional activity within the English language course.Index Terms-communication skills, project based learning, inter-disciplinary project work, science research area of engineering activity.

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The intercultural orientation of education at the present stage is dictated by the objective conditions of the socioeconomic and political context of the current century. Intercultural communicative competence is one of the main aspects of professional competence of a specialist. The intercultural orientation of language education is embodied in the objectives of the modern stage of development of the theory of teaching foreign languages. Language today is considered as a special tool for creating and interpreting the "image of the world", which provides the opportunity to "penetrate" into world culture, as well as the individual's awareness of their national and cultural identity, which in turn contributes to the formation and socialization of the student's personality. Such an understanding of the language, as well as the specificity of intercultural communication leads to the need to consider intercultural interaction from the perspective of mental processes. It is thinking that, being the highest stage of human knowledge, allows one to gain knowledge about such objects, properties and relations of the surrounding world that cannot be directly perceived through sensory perception. Thinking is an integral part and a special object of self-consciousness of a person, the structure of which includes understanding oneself as a subject of thinking, differentiation of "one's own" and "other's" thoughts, awareness of an unresolved problem as one's own, awareness of one's attitude to the problem. Critical thinking involves performing certain mental operations along with affective personality parameters. An analysis of intercultural communication from the perspective of cognitive personality parameters allows us to conclude that these parameters correlate with cognitive processes that form the essence of critical thinking and state the need for their interconnected development in the process of forming students' intercultural competence.

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