Abstract:

The search for factors and predictors of successful acculturation in the international students remains an urgent problem of modern psychological, pedagogical, sociological, linguistic and interdisciplinary research. Among the factors of successful intercultural adaptation (acculturation), personality traits, tolerance, intercultural competence / sensitivity, motivation, gender, age, and other personality and social features are considered. However, in our opinion, the attitude towards the language of the country of acculturation in the context of intercultural adaptation has not been studied enough.

The purpose of the present study is to identify the correlations between indicators of acculturation to Russia and attitudes towards the Russian language in Chinese students. Previous studies show that learning Russian presents many difficulties specifically for Chinese students due to the fact that Russian and Chinese languages belong to different groups of languages.

A total of 97 Chinese students study at Russian universities from 1 to 6 years took part in the research. To diagnose acculturation to Russia level, the Acculturation Scale to Russia (ASR) by A. Ardila et all. was used, which includes 20 items, agreement with which must be assessed on a five-point Likert scale from 1 to 5, the maximum score is 100. To diagnose attitudes towards the Russian language, a particular semantic differential was used, which includes 10 pairs of antonyms for assessing the Russian language: "simple – complex", "ugly – beautiful", "melodic – non-melodic", "slow – fast", "understandable – incomprehensible", "passive – active", "popular – unpopular", "boring – interesting", "loud – quiet", "clunk – voiced".

The descriptive statistics methods and Spearman’s rank correlation analysis were used for processing the data. Statistical processing was carried out in the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics, version 3.6.1., psych package version 1.9.6.

The findings show that the acculturation indicator by ASR positively correlates with the attitude towards the Russian language according to such scales of the semantic differential as: "Beauty", "Melodicity", "Understandability", "Interest", "Voicedness". Thus, Chinese students who are well adapted to Russian culture perceive the Russian language as more beautiful, melodic, understandable, interesting and voiced. Conversely, Chinese students with a low level of acculturation to Russia perceive the Russian language as more ugly, non-melodic, incomprehensible, boring, and clunk.

It can be concluded that it is important to develop a more positive image of the Russian language among Chinese students so that they do not perceive it as very difficult, incomprehensible and unpleasant to the ear. The proposed recommendations are aimed at encouraging Chinese students to study Russian more actively and with interest, since a positive attitude towards the Russian language will allow them to better adapt in Russia.

Keywords:

Chinese Students, Acculturation to Russia, Russian Language, Acculturation Scale to Russia (ASR), Semantic Differential.