Abstract:

The interest in studying Russian in Arab countries has been growing in recent years owing to the geopolitical shifts in the Middle East. Jordanian students have been traditionally attracted by Russian higher education in medicine, engineering, and agricultural sciences.
This paper reports on the experience of teaching Russian to Arab high school students in Jordan in order to give them opportunities to integrate more efficiently in the first year of university in Russia. Since 2016, the teachers of the RUDN University have regularly gone to Amman within the framework of the Cooperation Programme between the two countries. The Russian classes are provided by Russian teachers in both Arabic and English, because Jordanian schools that cooperate with the RUDN University follow the Cambridge International Curriculum and a number of disciplines in the school curriculum are taught in English.

The first methodological problem in teaching Russian to Arabs was that the traditional academic content of the Russian course for foreigners is not adapted to the Arab culture. Russian relations to the physical environment diverge significantly from Arab representations of the world. Although social and sociocultural knowledge introduced in the traditional academic content of the Russian textbooks for foreigners is not culturally particular to the Russian context, it cannot be easily shared by Arab students.

The second methodological problem in teaching Russian was grounded in the sociolinguistic and pragmatic component of the traditional academic content of the Russian course for foreigners. This content is elaborated according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The communicative approach implemented in the Russian textbooks for foreigners is based on dialogical interactions, on the one hand, between the teacher and the students, and on the other, between the students. The interactive activities which are required in the communicative approach cannot be realised by the Arab students with respect to efficient interaction schemata.

To explain the methodological problems revealed in the Russian classes for the Arab students, the study analyses particular aspects of communication in the Arab culture. The Arab style of communication leads students to violate the communicative distance while speaking to the teacher and the structure of a dialogical interaction between the students. The time management, the strategies of self-representation, a huge desire for encouragement, and a lack of independence in decision-making, which are characteristic of Arab culture, make the communicative approach difficult to adopt and implement in the Arab context.

In conclusion, the paper provides recommendations on how to adapt sociocultural and sociolinguistic academic content of the Russian course based on the communicative approach to teaching in order to allow the Arab students to be efficient in Russian language communication.

Keywords:

Arab, Russian, sociocultural-sociolinguistic competence.