PERCEPTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN THE MINDS OF TEACHERS OF RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (Based on a Psycholinguistic Experiment)

Abstract

The article describes the results of a psycholinguistic experiment aimed at identifying the perceptions of the Russian language in the minds of teachers of Russian as a foreign language. The specifi city of the experi-ment consists of the explicit professionally oriented character of the stimulus Russian language; during planning the experiment, the experience of similar studies with respondents-physicians was generalized of similar studies with respondents-philologists. One of the hypotheses, that preceded the experiment was the assumption that the teachers’ linguistic consciousness combines naive and scientifi c ideas about the Russian language in the teachers’ linguistic consciousness language. The experiment, built according to the free-chain model, was conducted in March–April 2023. The described material was extracted from 177 questionnaires, the total number of analyzed reactions is 1,185. In the fi rst stage of the analysis, the reactions were characterized in structural and grammati-cal aspect (predominantly one-word associations expressed by nouns), and at the second stage — in the semantic aspect. Semantic analysis of the associates allowed us to distinguish three semantic fi elds: “Russian language as an object of evaluation”, “Russian language as the basis of national Russian language as an object of evaluation”, “Russian language as the basis of national self-consciousness”, and “Russian language as an academic subject”. While analyzing the reactions that made up the fi rst fi eld, it proved expedient to refer to the typology of evalua-tive meanings proposed by N. D. Arutyunova. As a result, the predominance of private evaluative meanings in the fi eld was established of a wide spectrum. The second fi eld combines reactions based on their linguocultural potential: thus, the fi eld includes ethnonyms, culturally signifi cant toponyms, precedent phenomena, and symbol-ic words. The third fi eld most clearly represents the results of the work of professional linguistic consciousness and includes reactions of mainly terminological nature, correlated with linguistic concepts, sections of the course “Russian Language”, etc. The interpretation of the empirical material testifi es to the professionalization of the concept “Russian language” in the cognitive space of philologists and confi rms the hypothesis that associations refl ect the specifi cs of teaching Russian as a fo reign language, combining language teaching with immersion in Russian culture and intercultural communication. The respondents’ everyday perceptions include positive asso-ciative and evaluative meanings