Abstract:

There is a number of overlapping terms that point to the fact that education has been moving in the direction of cultural tolerance, empathy and understanding. These are cultural sensitivity, cultural awareness, cultural competence, cultural humility and others. In the linguistic realm we come across such expressions as politically correct language, linguistic diversity, language variation, transnational language, linguistic sensitivity. In our study we wanted to explore students’ competence in the aforementioned fields and test their intuition when faced with the notions of diversity and variation in context. The survey conducted among senior and junior students learning English as a foreign language at the Department of International Journalism in Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University, Russia) revealed that linguistic competence and fluency do not necessarily determine the linguistic awareness of ethical issues. The next step of the research was to find the appropriate discourse to introduce the sensitive issues and unobtrusively demonstrate the power of words through contexts. Topical words related to women, races and minorities were inspected in different discourses — literature, psychology, politics and social sciences. The concluding phase of the project was aimed at registering any changes in the shift of students’ attitude towards divisive issues. The findings show that context alleviates learning and comprehension and gives a wider scope to grapple with the notions swathed in popular opinion.

Keywords:

Cultural sensitivity, linguistic intuition and sensitivity, diversity, minorities, politically correct language, cultural humility, discourse.