COGNITIVE STRATEGIES OF RUSSIA’S IMAGE PRESENTATION IN BRITISH TEXTBOOKS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

English is one of the most popular foreign languages in Russia. It is studied in all state schools, universities and in many linguistic schools in Russia. There are many textbooks of the English language, but their content was studied mainly from the points of view of their methodology, unit structure, types of exercise and so on. However, textbooks are representatives of culture, the texts and exercises form the attitude of learners towards the country whose language is being studied and also towards the native country. This research analyzes cognitive strategies of Russia’s image presentation in textbooks of English published by the British publishing houses Pearson Longman, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. During this study we identified nine cognitive strategies of Russia’s image presentation in the analyzed textbooks. The most popular strategies are the following: giving general and shallow information about Russia; emphasizing the role of the Russian language in the world; inclusion of phenomena of Russian culture in the world’s cultural heritage; appeal to stereotypes about the Russian culture in their isolation from the modern socio-cultural context. Besides some textbooks use the cognitive strategy of elimination of information about Russia, while the other cultures are described. In spite of a small proportion of information about Russia in British textbooks of English, there is a tendency to include positive or neutral facts about Russia, rather than the negative ones. The choice of these cognitive strategies by the authors promotes the formation of the positive image of Russia, stimulates interest to the culture of this country and rejection of the notorious stereotypes.

Keywords

• cognitive strategies
• image of russia
• esl textbooks
• methods of teaching a foreign language
• english language