Филологический класс (Mar 2022)
Gastronomic Text in Teaching the Russian to Foreigners: Semiotic Projection
Abstract
The article analyzes the methodological principles of teaching the Russian language to foreigners. The authors propose to introduce the semiotic approach to the study of the city as a text of Russian culture with the projection on its gastronomic codes. The article mainly focuses on the results of the pilot project “Reading the City” which involved the Russian and Chinese students studying literature of Western Siberia and Russian oral speech of the Tyumen city (Master’s Degree Program “Russian Language and Russian Literature for Foreigners”, 2018–2020). The scope of analysis also includes the Siberian (Tyumen) text of the Russian literature. The project postulates a two-stage organization of the students’ academic and research work. Firstly, the students make an “urban gastronomic journey” (field research) when they study Russian and Chinese as foreign languages and get acquainted with the spoken language in the context of the semiotic signs of the Russian culture. Immersion into the atmosphere of cafe-museums, restaurant-museums, tasting dishes of the Russian regional cuisine, as well as the cuisine of the indigenous peoples of the Tyumen North, activates sensual and festive perception of the Siberian gastronomic text. Secondly, this approach contributes to a more successful study of the authentic text, makes it possible not only to see and understand lacunary gastronomic nominations, but also to interpret them as stylistic formulas of the local text and its metaphorical content. The result of the Russian-Chinese project was a gastronomic guide to Tyumen “A Journey to the Northern Home”, which has interdisciplinary character. The relevance and prospects of the research consist not only in the further development of the semiotic approach to teaching foreign languages, but also in the development of Russian-Chinese relations: tourism, excursions, and traveling.
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