Keyword: «foreign language audience»

The paper tells about the experience of studying the writings by Alexander Tvardovsky in a foreign audi-ence. The symbolic meaning of his works in the context of Soviet literature is underlined, specific concepts are emphasized, the further analysis of which may be promising not only for teaching purposes. Being treated as a leading representative of Smolensk poetic school Alexander Tvardovsky is analyzed within the frame of Soviet literature traditions, some stylistic aspects which appear because of language interference are also accentuated.

The relevance of the study is due to the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of student groups that are constantly replenished with foreign students, and the resulting linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in which Russian is the only means of communication. A uniform, undifferentiated teaching methodology does not fully take into account differences in the structure of students’ native languages, in their norms of communicative behaviour and in their ways of explicating experience. The aim of the article is to substantiate the differentiation of a foreign language audience according to a linguo-ethno-cognitive principle and to show how the nature of difficulties in learning Russian is related to the typological distance between the learner’s native language and the target language. The leading approach is the linguo-ethno-cognitive one, which combines linguistic, ethnic, cultural and cognitive components; the principal method is comparative-typological (contrastive) analysis, supplemented by typologisation and classification. As a result, the concept of a foreign-language audience is clarified, and five language groups are identified – Slavic, Turkic, Iranian, Chinese and Indian – for each of which zones of positive transfer and zones of interference are distinguished, while the interferences themselves are classified by nature into physical, physiological, psychological and semantic-conceptual ones. A consolidated gradation of the groups is constructed, according to which, as the typological distance increases, the main source of difficulty shifts from the formal level to the conceptual one, and the amount of positive transfer decreases – from maximal in the Slavic group to virtually absent in the Chinese one. The theoretical significance of the work lies in integrating scattered linguistic and methodological observations into a single graded model. Its practical significance is determined by the fact that the proposed model gives the teacher a basis for the targeted selection and presentation of teaching material according to the dominant type of difficulty for each group, as well as for developing differentiated corrective courses and diagnostic maps of typical errors.