Аннотация:The paper gives a didactic insight into the concept of “intercultural academic communication” /IAC/ analyzing its
types, forms, structure and bilingual input for the purposes of improving Russian advanced students’
communication skills as intercultural speakers and writers in English-speaking academic settings. On the basis
of the 2015-2017 cross-cultural analysis of Russian Master’s Degree & PhD Students’ experiences of
intercultural communication it provides a didactically-oriented and competency-based classification of
communicative barriers to effective cross-cultural academic communication, describing such of them as
linguistic, pragmatic, sociocultural, cognitive and visual communication barriers. The paper argues that the
theoretical framework for designing tasks aiming at improving PhD students’ bilingual pluricultural competence
to use English as a lingua franca in intercultural academic settings is to be based on L. Vygotsky’s cultural
historical theory, A.N Leontiev’s activity theory, A.A. Leontiev’s psychological theory of communication, S. Hall’s
theory of cultural factors and contexts and culturally-oriented FLT approaches to developing students’ bilingual
academic competences on a multidisciplinary basis. The paper concludes with some recommendations on
creating a hierarchical set of multidisciplinary problem-solving tasks and activities specifically designed to help
PhD students meet new 21st century challenges of intercultural communication & co-operation, avoiding culturebound
academic pitfalls in today’s extremely complicated world. Among these tasks are those that involve PhD
students’ into: a) observing and generalizing the similarities and differences of communicative and/or cognitive
academic schemata in Russian and in English; b) classifying communicative barriers between intercultural
speakers or writers (incl. English native & non-native speakers); c) interpreting the appropriacy of academic
products in a FL from a global intercultural perspective; d) making suggestions for necessary pluricultural
academic self-education in order to be able to foresee and/or identify communication barriers and find effective
communicative tools to bridge intercultural academic gaps; e) doing thought-provoking case-studies in IAC; f)
transforming interculturally inappropriate academic products in a FL into appropriate ones; g) group role-playing
of IAC schema modes involving different academic roles that are typical of English-speaking international
science co-operation settings; h) doing “Study & Innovate” projects.