Valentine K. Zharov - Professor, Head of Department of Fundamental and Applied Mathematics, Russian State University for the Humanities
Address: 6, Miusskaya Square, Moscow, 125993, Russian Federation  
E-mail: valcon@mail.ru

Yulia V. Taratukhina - Associate Professor, Department of Innovation and Business in Information Technologies, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation
E-mail: jtaratuhina@hse.ru

      In contemporary society, teachers often have to deal with a multicultural student audience, both in a traditional format, and in the process of online training. In general, the culture of each country has an impact on the educational process and largely determines is. This, in turn, implies a uniqueness of the educational content, objectives, value and tasks of education, teaching methods, pedagogical discourse, specifics of building an educational path, etc.
      This paper traces the relationship between the cultural influence and educational practices expressed in target, value and communication formats. Many teachers call attention to the problem of constructive knowledge transfer in a multicultural teaching environment as the main problem in this context, in addition to the specifics of cognitive, communication and psycho-pedagogical factors. However, the multicultural environment is taken to mean not only national differences, but also a different previous professional “background” (this refers to students of master's programs, etc.).
      In this paper, we share the experience of selecting criteria for the possibility of building a cultural cognitive model of communication with students (tactical and strategic methods of developing various types of discourse) in order to optimize the teaching process in the multicultural environment. The criteria based on which a new-generation multicultural educational environment is to be built and which is able to provide constructive knowledge transfer are presented as follows: communication criterion (change of traditional communication forms in the “teacher – student” system), methodological criterion (emergence of the cultural and adaptive methods of work with educational information), content criterion (differentiation and possible inhomogeneity of the educational content in the educational process) and information criterion (development and use of educational resources taking into account cultural specifics of information perception and handling). The aforementioned points, in turn, cannot but affect the transformation of some institutes of the existing information and pedagogical environment.