USE OF TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE ARABIC LANGUAGE IN THE FORMATION OF STUDENTS’ LEXICAL SKILLS

In the era of globalization, mankind faces the problem of mutual understanding among peoples. In the process of communication, in order to understand foreigners’ speech and to express their own thoughts, people need to have quite a high level of intelligence and a large vocabulary. Certainly, this refers to the professional communication in a foreign language, rather than to everyday communication. It is graduates of higher educational institutions who should obtain such a high qualification.

Thus, the main purpose of working on the vocabulary in the process of training is to form lexical skills. However, the methods of forming students’ lexical skills are different and they directly depend on the specific lexical and grammatical character of the target language.

Mastering the vocabulary of the Arabic language involves considerable difficulties. The main difficulty is the large amount of the Arabic thesaurus, which is due to certain historical, political and socio-cultural reasons. The current linguistic situation in the Arab countries is characterized by the coexistence, functional-stylistic differentiation and interaction of several linguistic forms.

It is the Literary Arabic language which serves as the official language of the Arab world and the state language of the Arab countries. Interethnic communication of the peoples of the Middle East and North-East Africa is carried out by means of regional everyday conversational koine. The Arabic literary language, common to all Arab countries, is opposed by the Arabic dialect system, which includes the most characteristic features of all local dialects.

All the above-mentioned factors make a teacher carefully select lexical units in the minimum vocabulary. Thus, at the initial stage of training, it should mostly include the common lexis. The preference is given to the frequency stylistically neutral words with extensive compatibility, whereas the words related to dialectisms, jargonisms, professionalisms, are included in the lexical minimum at the advanced stage of training.

The authors come to the conclusion that the greatest difficulty among students is caused by distinguishing the root of an Arabic word. It is due to the typological features of the Arabic language. Given this, at the initial stage of training it is necessary to draw students’ attention to the difference of the structure of an Arabic word (of Semitic origin) from the Indo-European one: an Arabic root is a lexical abstraction expressed by three constant consonants. The root is preserved semantically and phonetically both in inflexion and in word-formation, which allows, on the one hand, distinguishing it as a common element in a number of cognate words, and, on the other hand, separating those stem-forming (inflectional and derivational) affixes which bring grammatical meanings and are conventional for the formation of certain grammatical categories.

The conclusions drawn in the paper are of great practical importance. The earlier students studying Arabic learn to distinguish the root and the stem-forming element in a word, the sooner an Arabic word will become clearer for them and the less time it will take them to look up that word in the dictionary and to memorize it.