Teaching western European languages with a turn to the East: what does it imply?

Abstract

The article discusses the necessity to refocus teaching pluricentric foreign languages from linguistic and cultural features in the traditional countries onto the specifics of varieties considered to be non-native for their users participating in a wide international / intercultural communication. East Asian varieties are a good example of such a phenomenon. For an unprepared communicator it is quite challenging to perceive and comprehend varieties of this type — challenges occur at all levels of language structure: phonographic, grammatical, lexico-semantic, and discourse-pragmatic. The ways to solve these problems include raising students’ awareness of the existence of the varieties of a pluricentric language, i.e., the World Englishes paradigm; receptive training of Asian English speech comprehension; awareness of challenges in understanding students’ own (Russian) variety of English (or another pluricentric language) for communicators using other varieties; studying translingual literature written by authors of Chinese (or other Asian) origin; listening and reading mass media in the variety; training intermediary translation from the variety into Russian, and acquiring the basis of intercultural literacy. All these ways are relevant not only for teaching Russian students; they will also help in teaching Chinese students whose number has been increasing at our universities

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