Abstract:

Foreign language competence as a component of non-linguistic students’ professional competence suggests that a teacher focuses on building students' ability and willingness to solve communicative problems in the field of their professional activity. A future specialist should be ready to solve the problems arising in professional situations and typical tasks through the use of the linguistic means of a foreign language. However, the building of such foreign language competence implies the consistent building of subcompetences, namely: linguistic, discursive, strategic, sociocultural, pragmatic, personal. In the context of reduction in class hours, a teacher mainly focuses on the linguistic and communicative components. It should be emphasized that when it comes to teaching a language with a high degree of grammaticality (such as Arabic), then it is linguistic competence which is a priority. Understanding the need and importance of sociocultural knowledge, the mentality of the native speakers of the target language, as well as the specifics of their speech behavior, teachers look for ways to introduce the so-called background knowledge into the educational process.

In the 2018/2019 academic year, the Arabic language teachers of the Department of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of RUDN University conducted an experiment in two groups of the 3rd year students specializing in “International Relations” and “Foreign Regional Studies”. At the end of the year, the students of these groups were to go on a study tour to Egypt and Morocco. In the first group, as illustrative material there were gradually introduced authentic proverbs and sayings. There were analyzed the linguistic specificity of the construction of such texts, the peculiarities of pronunciation, as well as the situations of their application.
After returning from the study tour, the students were offered a questionnaire, the purpose of which was to identify the expedience of further using proverbs and sayings at Standard Arabic lessons.

The results of the survey showed that studying proverbs and sayings at the lessons provided the students with the necessary knowledge of the dialectal features of the Arabic language; it expanded their background ideas of the mentality of the Arab people, greatly facilitated their communication with representatives of a different culture, which ultimately raised their self-esteem and stimulated further language study.

Keywords:

Educational technologies, foreign language competence, sociocultural competence, knowledge of linguistic and cultural studies, proverbs and sayings, Arabic.