Linguistic and cultural commentary on onyms as a way of forming the linguistic and socio-cultural competence of non-native learners

Abstract

The article discusses the method of linguoculturological commenting on proper names in the process of forming the linguistic and socio-cultural competence of foreign students. The purpose of the study is to consider the stages and features of the compilation of educational texts that will contribute to the solution of two tasks at once – linguistic education and socio-cultural adaptation of non-native learners to living conditions in a new region. In the article, the author describes the features of linguoculturological commenting on an onym, which is based on its semantic analysis. This analysis reveals the components of both the core of the structure of meaning (denotation, referent, signifier) and the periphery which includes cultural-historical, communicative-situational and emotional-evaluative components. At the same time, the author emphasizes that the linguistic and cultural description cannot become an object of study in the classroom: working with non-native learners requires simplification of syntactic constructions, selection of lexical units that correspond to the level of students' language proficiency, the use of in-text explanations. According to the author, the main conditions for the selection of vocabulary for linguistic and cultural description in the process of forming linguistic competence are considering the relevance of the proper name and the methodological expediency of its use at a specific stage of teaching Russian as a foreign language. As an example, the article presents two educational texts – about the Trinity Cathedral, the main attraction of Pskov, and about the life of A. S. Pushkin in the village of Mikhailovsky.