Филологический класс (Dec 2022)
The Formation of a Secondary Linguistic Personality in the Space of a Foreign Language
Abstract
The article deals with the psycholinguistic and methodological problem of the formation of a secondary linguistic identity in the process of foreign language acquisition. Relying on the theories of the linguistic world mapping and the linguistic personality, as well as on many years of experience in teaching Russian as a foreign language, the authors draw conclusions about the need to rethink the teaching objectives and shift the focus to methods and techniques that open a new linguistic world view to the student, since the development of a secondary linguistic personality is based on it. The starting point is the idea that the native speaker acquires the national culture by means of their native language and the language specific world view, so that the key goal of the foreign language teaching methodology should be the search for methods and techniques for developing the student’s perceptual ability to comprehend the specificity of world mapping in the language studied, with the purpose of attaining such a level in foreign language acquisition as thinking in this language. The authors see the main goal of any foreign language course, starting with the elementary one, to be the formation of a secondary linguistic personality which makes the student ready for the intercultural dialogue. Everything else should be subordinated to this goal as particular tasks and steps on the way up to it. The authors claim that the methods and techniques that are supposed, in accordance with the main goal of foreign language teaching, to teach how “to perform speech acts” in a new language, should be aimed at the formation of a secondary linguistic personality that can express themselves and comprehend the interlocutors’ intentions in the intercultural dialogue; and create and perceive oral and written texts on different aspects of life and of varying degrees of complexity, depth, and accuracy without translation. A secondary linguistic personality is a dynamic, constantly evolving construct that is built on top of the already existing linguistic personality, embracing and using all the existing cognitive settings and expanding their potential. These structures are not parallel, but closely interrelated at the levels of Lexicon, Thesaurus, Pragmaticon, and discursive competence. The ability to fully participate in the intercultural dialogue is an indicator of the complete formation of the secondary linguistic personality.
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