ИСТИНА

Since the beginning of the new millennium several methodological issues related to developing & measuring foreign leaners mediation skills in a FL have been raised and widely discussed in the CEFR language methodology. In 2018 it provided FLT specialists with new twenty scales for measuring learners’ skills in using mediation strategies and acting appropriately in cross-cultural and pluricultural communication settings. Meanwhile, these six-level mediation scales as any other CEFR scales are to be profiled in order to answer the needs of the educational context in which this or that language is taught as a school or university subject. The paper discusses a FL methodological strategy in profiling the CEFR mediation scales to make them appropriate to use in Russian university settings in which English is taught as a lingua franca to tertiary students who do either MS degree or PhD in the Arts. This methodological strategy involves: a) studying the needs for using English as a lingua franca by Russian professional humanitarians in their international education & research activities across the globe; b) additionally clarifying the objectives relating to a particular cycle of university education and a particular degree programme with a specific focus on what CEFR types of mediation are to be at the core of university EL syllabi and courses; c) linguo-didactic description of the most common cross-cultural barriers in academic settings; d) designing a syllabus for mediation that can be introduced at the second or third cycles of university education; e) analyzing the methodological appropriateness of EL teaching & learning materials for providing cross-cultural and/or pluricultural mediation education through co-learnt languages & making decisions on the ways of innovating them for the purposes of using them as tools of teaching students to act as cultural mediators in (incl. scholarly) intercultural academic settings or developing new innovative mediation course-books for university students to achieve the mediation objectives under consideration; f) designing assessment tools for measuring mediation skills and strategies on the basis of initial piloting the CEFR mediation scales in Moscow State University contexts, and then, profiling them according to the research training framework for humanitarian students. The paper ends up with presenting two samples of a mediation syllabus for MSU PhD students specializing in linguistics & language education studies.