Russian Language and Culture: Exploring Teaching and Learning

Author: Ji Yuanlong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-10-01
Features: Russian Linguistic Geography emerged in the early 1970s in the Soviet Union, primarily focusing on the cultural aspects of Russian vocabulary. The study of Linguistic Geography has flourished in China for nearly three decades. The Chinese Association of Russian Language Teaching has held six national conferences on "Language and Culture" in higher education institutions, with hundreds of research articles and dozens of monographs and dictionaries published on the subject, yielding significant achievements. However, the drawback is that almost all researchers view Linguistic Geography as a branch of sociolinguistics, overlooking a crucial fact: Russian Linguistic Geography is primarily a new foreign language teaching method applied to teaching Russian to foreigners (РКИ) (see the preface of the monograph "Language and Culture" by Russian scholars Vil'echkin and Kostomarov). The purpose of this teaching method is to help students understand and familiarize themselves with the situation and culture of Russia (including politics, economy, culture and arts, historical geography, folklore, and religion) while learning Russian.