Abstract:

As pertains to professional communication training, the issue of reducing lexical interference holds a controversial position in foreign language methodology: while the issue obviously poses a challenge, it remains relatively unexplored in terms of methodological aspects involved. The most significant obstacles and errors in foreign language teaching have to do with the linguistic phenomena taking on contrasting shapes in the target and native languages.

This article aims to develop a set of methodological principles to help overcome lexical interference of Russian in ESP learning. This is a complex task. Using authentic training materials, audio courses, newspapers, magazines, and online content, providing adequate methodological handling of foreign language features, identifying challenging lexical peculiarities of the English language, estimating the most probable manifestations of interference on the lexical level can help expose the main causes and roots of lexical interference and errors in LSP learning.

The vocabulary of most of the world’s languages incorporates a significant number of words common to two or more languages. Their occurrence can be traced to specific historical reasons – common etymology of languages, prolonged domestic and cultural communication of peoples speaking different tongues. Lexical interference stems from disparity, variance in terms of the volume of notions, in particular, when it comes to international roots and the so-called ‘false friends of a translator’.

By identifying the areas of convergence and divergence in the use of language means, we will be able to detect the scope of interference, estimate probable challenges, and devise ways of dealing with errors caused by lexical, as well as other types of interference.
The study deploys the methods of complex semantic analysis of interfering lexical units.

Keywords:

LSP teaching, interference, lexicology, economic discourse.