ON THE ISSUE OF SELECTING CULTURE- SPECIFIC LANGUAGE UNITS FOR TEACHING RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN IRAN

Abstract

Language, being an integral element of culture, emphasizes the most unique in it. In order for Iranian students to fully master socio-cultural competence, it is necessary to acquaint them with the peculiarities of language use within the framework of a new culture. The purpose of this article was to develop and substantiate the procedure for selecting vocabulary with a national-cultural component, which should be introduced to Iranian students in a Russian language lesson at the middle stage of education. The leading research method was an open associative experiment, in which 49 native Persian speakers took part. Iranian associations were compared with associations from the Russian Regional Associative Dictionary, and the number of matching associations was counted for each stimulus. Based on the obtained results, conclusions were made about the need for linguacultural commentary when studying these words at the middle stage of education. Among the culturally specific units we selected, 17% of the stimuli revealed a significant similarity in the associative reactions of Russian and Iranian respondents. They caused 65-80% identical associations, demonstrating the similarity of the national-cultural semantics of these words. Another 7 stimuli (24%) caused 40-65% overlapping reactions, 12 stimuli (41%) caused 20-40% similar reactions, 5 words (17%) activated little or no similar associations in native speakers of Russian and Persian. In our opinion, the comparison of associative fields can be recommended as an effective method for selecting culturally specific vocabulary when teaching Russian according to the first certification level program.