In contemporary changing and innovative academic and working environment, tertiary schools need to rethink their approach to teaching and learning by gearing it towards the skills in most demand. Innovation in any sphere becomes more and more dependent on the collaboration between actors from very different backgrounds who combine their own expertise to create something new. This happens both on an individual- as well as on an institutional level. The organizations of the future will be forced to work more and more closely with people and institutional partners from all over the world in order to bring as many different perspectives and areas of expertise together as possible. This means that cross-cultural competence becomes one of the crucial factors in building a competitive profile of a prospective specialist. Therefore, this paper explores approaches to building cross-cultural competence using the English language as a tool and presents the findings of a pilot training on experimental collaborative cross-cultural project implemented with Master level Economics students in Ukraine. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data and examine participants' language proficiency. The findings suggest that participation in collaborative technology-enhanced cross-cultural projects has a significant positive effect on learners’ language proficiency and develops their cross-cultural competence facilitating development of productive skills on the basis of receptive ones.

The article deals with the use of effective reading strategies with Generation Z students based on a critical review of modern psychological and pedagogical studies of 'digital learners'. The relevance of the study is substantiated by the fact that the subjects of the modern educational process today are mostly representatives of Generation Z and their ways of study, preferences and values are bringing important changes to teaching and learning contexts. The purpose of the article is to analyse effective reading strategies using authentic texts. It features a brief overview of the studies devoted to the reading strategies and highlights the differences between reading skills and reading strategies. The authors explore the concept of authenticity of texts and tasks and suggest their highly motivational nature for digital learners. The article presents an analysis of Generation Z's unique characteristics and projects them onto the choice of effective reading strategies for digital learners. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications and a list of recommendations to consider when selecting effective reading strategies for language classrooms.

In English for Specific Purposes, one of the challenges is to transform teaching and learning into a process, which focuses on the development of professional skills, enables students to become successful learners of the target language, and makes them more aware of the local and global environments. This paper aims to analyse key challenges that teachers and learners face in the classrooms and suggest a way of integrating global issues into the process of development of professional soft and hard skills. The paper studies the existing ESP literature in terms of presence of global issues, explores the perceptions of global issues among university students in Ukraine, outlines the correlation between professional skills and global competence. The findings suggest that there are numerous advantages of introducing materials based on global issues into the teaching process as it has synergetic effect of fusing professional skills, soft skills and global competence. The paper concludes that this fusion improves the skill set of a future professional and has a positive impact on the quality of higher education in general.

The paper presents an approach to assessing insurance market infrastructure entities’ activity that allows identifying gaps and weaknesses and seeking ways of addressing them in the context of revitalization of such emerging insurance markets as Ukrainian. To determine the impact of costs of insurance market infrastructure entities on the financial performance before taxes resulting from insurance activity, the regression formula is used. It demonstrates significant dependence between financial performance before taxes of insurers and costs of accident commissioner services. Based on this, an assessment approach for groups of insurance market infrastructure entities is created. The assessment results suggest that the efficiency of insurance market infrastructure entities in Ukraine is unsatisfactory (135 points out of 390). To develop infrastructure entities of the insurance market in Ukraine, it is expedient to ensure an effective regulatory framework for all insurance infrastructure entities, including registers, reporting, and a requirement to disclose information on their performance.

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