The concept of “prominent personality” in teaching Russian as a foreign language

Abstract

The article explores the concept of prominent personality as a socio-cultural unit in the
content of Russian as a foreign language teaching. The purpose of the study is to analyze the
functioning of this concept in the modern Russian language, to clarify its meaning and content
in its relation to language pedagogy, to formulate a hitherto absent definition of this concept
as a term in the applied linguistics, to establish a relationship with the concepts of character,
anthroponym, precedent name. The research was based on material from Russian language
corpus data, modern oral and written media discourse, various explanatory and specialized
dictionaries, scholarly literature on the applied linguistics, cultural linguistics, literary studies
and school pedagogy. In her research, the author used the following methods: discourse analysis, analysis of dictionary defi nitions, analysis of scholarly
and methodological literature, structural and semantic analysis,
comparative method, method of generalization. The relevance
and the novelty of the study is due to the fact that the question
of the definition and content of the term prominent personality
has not yet been considered in the scholarly literature, while the
phenomenon itself exists and was discussed in publications on
the applied linguistics. In the course of the research, the author
has considered the dictionary interpretation of the Russian word
“personalia”, as well as its functioning in the media discourse
and research literature, and analyzed its content as a term in
teaching Russian as a foreign language. As a result, the author
concluded that the word “personalia” has relatively recently come
innto usage in the meaning of a “famous person”. The author
has also revealed the relationship between the methodological
concept of prominent personality and the concepts of character,
anthroponym, precedent name, and has defined prominent
personality as a socio-cultural unit of learning, has made a
conclusion about the complex nature of this concept, which
includes methodological, linguistic and cultural components.

Keywords:

prominent personality, teaching methods, Russian as a foreign language, socio-cultural competence