Features and problems of teaching Russian medical lexis to Arabic-speaking medical students and their solution with the help of mnemonics

Abstract

The article identifies the main problems that arise when teaching Russian to Arabic-speaking medical students. The purpose of our research is to consider typical features and errors in the perception of medical lexis by Arab medical students and identify ways of solving them using mnemonics. In the theory and methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, there is a constant search for effective methods to solve the following problems of spelling: “mirror writing” among Arab medical students, as well as errors arising from the interfering influence of English and French, the replacement of letters and the omission of certain letters in medical terms. The article also focuses on the problems of Arabic-speaking students’ perception related to their native Arabic culture, namely right-to-left writing, known in linguistics as “Semitic writing”, and the perception of the chronology of events, which is also directly related to the right-hand Semitic writing. We suggest our own special mnemonics for Arab medical students. The obtained results showed that our mnemonic techniques contribute not only to the elimination of the abovementioned spelling errors and perception problems, but also activate the mechanism of hemispheric interaction and neural connections in the brain; consequently, Arabic-speaking students actively memorize and consolidate professional medical lexis in Russian in the classes of Russian as a foreign language.