Abstract:

The modern educational environment requires the integration of national education systems into the global educational context. Different learning requirements for the content, methods, and results pose challenges to linguistics and teaching. One of the challenges is overcoming the linguistic, cultural, and competence-based barriers when teaching international students in Russia. For example, the preparatory programme (foundation year) for humanities requires learning Russian history.

The specific approach to teaching international students the required subjects is due to a number of barriers such as:
1) language level (A2-B1+);
2) the cultural diversity of students;
3) different attitudes to different historic events;
4) stereotypical views of Russia, its political and historical contexts.

Traditionally, Russian culture and history leaned towards Europe. This poses a challenge for students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East who decide to learn about Russia.

Educational texts enable to overcome these challenges. They teach history and presuppose intensive work with the linguistic and cultural components. Several key points should be taken into account when teaching history to international students: learning specific vocabulary (a significant number of words used for the description of historical context are not used in everyday speech); learning Russian history and understanding the logic of the historical context. The major difficulty is the need to simplify and reduce the complexity of historical knowledge for better understanding by students.

Using the topic of Kievan Rus’ as an example, we propose the following lesson plan. The first stage is the pre-text work that includes the semantization of vocabulary with the provision of a visual context, description of the meaning of the word, discussion of the word usage, and working with the typical grammar forms and grammatical constructions. For example, knyaz is the head of state, and Rurik was the first knyaz of the Rus’. The second stage is working with the text. During this stage, students read the text aloud and translate its parts. The third stage is about understanding the text. It suggests doing reading comprehension exercises, discussing the text, searching for possible connections with other cultures and countries. For example, knyaz Oleg, who united Novgorod and Kiev, is compared with Qin Shi Huang who unified China. During the third stage, it is important to move from text reading to expressing one’s own opinion and using one’s own vocabulary.

In order to fully understand the historical fact, we need to examine the combination of historical and linguistic components when working on the text. We need to put a particular event in Russian history in the broad cultural context, compare the perceptions of the event by people from different cultures, and take the level of linguistic skills into account.

Keywords:

Educational text, history of Russia, Russian as foreign language, ethnic and language barriers.