Abstract:

Teaching a foreign language and translation/ interpretation within the dialogue of cultures, considering the peculiarities of the language and culture of the people in cross-cultural communication, is nowadays an indispensable condition for the successful realisation of any language education technology.

At present the main source of information are media texts. Providing for a significant part of social life, they reflect the averaged perception of the world by the people of a particular country or culture. The media cover not only domestic but international affairs, creating international audiences with English texts being the most popular.

In the process of rapid development of the language, new phenomena arise in the speech, which are gradually reflected in the media texts. To ensure a complete understanding and interpretation of their meaning, students are to acquire profound background knowledge. It helps reveal the essence of the phenomenon, and, consequently, transfer information from one language to the other correctly. In this context, the issue of building the translator/ interpreter's background knowledge becomes especially relevant.

The paper makes an insight into the linguacultural strategy of enhancing students’ background knowledge that has been successfully introduced by the authors at the Higher School of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, Kazan Federal University, Russian Federation. The experiment materials include media texts of the BBC news (over 100 in total). The paper presents an innovative socio-personal strategy of building the background knowledge of future translators/ interpreters, based on the idea of effective integration, implemented in perspective pedagogical approaches: competence, axiological, cultural, linguistic, person-oriented, profession-oriented and developing, to increase the effectiveness of the background knowledge formation.

The research data accumulated by means of traditional methods of literature review, observation, interview, product analysis and questionnaire allow the authors to come to a number of conclusions. Among them is the idea of integration of Foreign Language and Culture Studies that is able to provide an adequate response to new challenges of cross-cultural communication and which is most conducive to understanding the characteristics of the country's language and culture.

The research has an interdisciplinary character – it is carried out at the confluence of Linguistics, Culture and Country Studies thus being a contribution into the study of content and language integrated learning. The presented innovative strategy specify the concept and dominants of background knowledge, the essence, content, structure and educational technology of building of future translators/ interpreter’s background knowledge.

The papers proves that the essence of the integration of linguistic and cultural knowledge is the consideration of a foreign language and culture through the prism of the national character and international political, socio-economic and cultural ties, which reflect the basic values and traditions of national cultures encoded in language and art as cultural activities.

The authors’ views are supported by the information obtained via the students’ tests and survey results which illustrate the dynamics of the experimental work and, consequently, the effectiveness of the presented linguacultural strategy of enhancing students’ background knowledge in Linguistics.

Keywords:

Student, background knowledge, Linguacultural strategy, language, teaching, learning, translation, education, education technology, Linguistics, Russia.