Vol 20, No 4 (2022): Traditions and innovations in Rusistics

The author thoroughly examines the emergence, formation and development of the Russian studies in Bulgaria as a scientific field, both in retrospect and in the context of its current state. The author traces the influence of historical, political and socio-economic factors on teaching Russian to Bulgarians. Keeping in mind the changes in the political and socio-economic orientation of the Republic of Bulgaria and of the Russian Federation in the last three decades, it appears relevant at the present states of development of the two countries to comprehensively describe the various development trends of the Russian studies and Russian language teaching in Bulgaria. Representative material from scientific publications and collective monographs on heterogeneous aspects of the Russian studies (linguistic, literary and applied) has been used in the research. Traditional methods of analysis and evaluation of scientific literature, observation, description and generalization of pedagogical experience are applied in this study. It also includes analysis of data from the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria on the number of schoolchildren studying Russian at different stages and in different types of secondary schools. The official statistical data show a stable interest in the Russian language among Bulgarian pupils and students, regardless of changing attitudes in the society. The Russian language remains the second most frequently chosen after English. The pragma-tic attitude of pupils and students, a combination of subjective and objective factors contribute to their choice to study Russian. The specific feature of the Bulgarian model is teaching Russian at all levels: preschool, school, university and continuing education in accordance with the European policy of lifelong learning.

The authors focus on the interconnection between the basic constituents of two phenomena relevant to modern Russian studies - the phenomenon of cyberactivism and the linguistic personality of a feminist activist. The relevance is determined by the object of the study, which is a special form of social and linguo-cultural interactions - the discursive practices of feminist cyberactivism. Being transmitted in the network environment for promoting socio-political activities, feminist cyberactivism represents a substantial part of content nowadays and appears to be one ofthe most important factors in the formation of axiological determinants in the Russian society.The aim of the study is to identify and systematically characterize the specific linguistic features of actual feminist and pro-feminist blogs, demonstrating both the ideological views of the feminismand the peculiar linguistic representation of feminism as a thematic field in the aspect of idioethnic features of the linguistic personality of a feminist activist. Particular attention is paid to the methods of verbal definition of the problematic field of feminist cyberactivism (primarily, the definition of gender inequality index in Russia) as well as to the identification of basic semasiological mechanisms for “modifying” the pragmatic parameters of the Russian-speaking feminist blogosphere. The material was collected from online blogs of feminist activists, text units from thematic feminist communities in social networks, as well as text materials of public organizations whose activities are closely related to feminist ideology. The critical discourse analysis, functional analysis of media texts (blogs), complex structural and contextual analysis of the language system of the Russian blogo-sphere, stylistic analysis of visual resources of the Russian language, linguo-pragmatic analysis of communicative acts, and the method of linguo-culturological interpretations were applied. The authors discovered that blog activism has several characteristic features that are reflected in its verbal and communicative content. The main purpose of most blogs (especially those belonging to personal pro-feminist blogs) is an act of self-presentation. This is the reason why this type of activism often hasan individual, rather than a collective nature, and the authors, as a rule, do not indicate their civil or political goals, which brings this framework of feminist discourse closer to non-political social practices. It is concluded that bloggers rarely use conventional language forms traditionally inherent to ideologized practices. This in turn leads to the evolvement of new communication strategies and, given the expansion pace of modern blogosphere, may have a major social effect in the future. The authors prove that by cultivating “at a certain angle,” the sense-forming component of feminist discourse, which is a critical reflection of female subjectiveness, feminist cyberactivism demonstrates a high degree of civil society involvement in certain political processes since it essentially aims at fulfilling the socio-ethological function (organization of hyperdiscourse through optimizing the reci-pient’s behavior and forming a need to share an actualized standpoint). Further consideration of fe-minist cyberactivism, which is both the primary method for the expansion of feminist community in Russia and its constitutive feature, can answer many questions on the linguo-cultural and, more broadly, civilizational structure of Russian society.

The relevance of the research is explained by the insufficient studying of the phenomenon of repeating semes in neologisms of a certain time period in the aspect of the interpretative function of language. The purpose of the study is to analyze the semes in the semantic structure of the neologisms of the coronavirus era and to characterize the part of linguistic worldview in the crisis period. The research material included occasional words recorded in Russian media and thematically connected with one theme - the 2020 pandemic. The source of the research is “The Dictionary of Russian Language of Coronavirus Epoch.” The research was conducted within the framework of sociolinguistics with the method of componential analysis of semantics, word-building and context analyzes. In the process of the research, the thematic subgroups were identified; in each subgroup, the occasional nominations were revealed; the means of evaluation were determined (some productive bases - for compounds; word-building formants - for affixal derivatives), and a general interpretive seme was determined (based on the contextual meaning). Finally, the total number of the words connected with a semantic dominant was determined. These data are presented in the summary table which demonstrates the percentage of representation, and hence the degree of significance of each dominant in the process of language coding of reality. As a result of the study, the semantic dominants uniting the occasional words of different authors and demonstrating the typical assessments of COVID-19 are revealed; the degree of frequency of semantic dominants is determined. The novelty of the research is explained by the specifics of the conducted semantic analysis: for the first time, common semes reflecting the peculiarities of the emotional and mental state of the society are revealed on a significant homogeneous array of word-building derivatives.

The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to identify semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness associated with historical, cultural, social, political and economic transformations. This authors describe and analyze the semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness of the Soviet Russia and the Russian diaspora abroad in the first three decades of the 20th century. The purpose of the study is to reveal the semantics of the word “home” in the first three decades of the 20th century through the ana-lysis of fiction texts of that time. For this purpose, a complex methodology for analyzing vocabulary was used, including the descriptive method based on the analysis of dictionary definitions, linguo-stylistic analysis of fiction texts. The research material includes dictionary definitions of the word “home”, represented in the basic explanatory dictionaries of the 19-20th centuries and dictionaries of modern times, fiction and memoir texts. The novelty of the presented data lies in the fact that the analysis of the semantic changes of the word “home” is for the first time carried out in order to compare individual sections of the linguistic picture of the world of Russian speakers in Russia and in emigration against the backdrop of the revolution and in the first post-revolutionary decades. The linguistic reflection of this key concept of Russian linguistic culture at the junction of the two historical eras - pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary - is socially conditioned and presented as a turning point in fiction and memoirs of the first half of the 20th century. Further study of the semantics of the word “home” is supposed to be connected with the observation of the language of the late 20th - early 21st centuries.

Teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) without immersion into a natural language environment presents a particular challenge and requires modern methods to deve-lop basic communicative and linguistic competencies of the students. While teaching listening at the first stage of learning a foreign language, an active use of authentic materials plays an important role as one of the major requirements of the communicative approach. The relevance of the present topic consists in the need of developing listening skills at the early stage of studying RFL and optimizing the work of students as independent learners. The aim of the study was to develop a set of video exercises for A0 level, aimed at improving the communicative competence of students, their knowledge of cultural norms and speech etiquette. To achieve this aim,a set of methodological methods has been used: a task modeling method, a comparative method and observation. The complete set of exercises was tested in groups of students aged 20-45, learning Russian as a foreign language at beginner’s level at two language centers, in Spain and in the Netherlands. Exercises with video fragments were divided into six units and were designed to practice the use of some grammar forms and lexical units (verbs belonging to the first and second conjugation type, prepositions в/на (in, on), accusative and prepositional cases).For independent work, students were asked to complete the preparatory and main stages of each unit. The final stage, as a control stage, was carried out in the classroom with a teacher to activate the structures heard in listening, analyze and discuss the video material. The results ofthe study show that the use of authentic materials improves listening, brings the educational process as close as possible to the situation of real live communication, motivates students and helps them to master the new grammatical and lexical units. There were no significant differences observed in the results of the final task on listening in Spanish and Dutch groups. The errors have to do with an increased speed of utterance, voice overlapping, children's speech, that will be taken into account for the further development of listening exercises for A0 level students and publishing a full set of exercises for RFL learners and teachers.

The relevance of the study is determined by the search for a compromise in teaching the Russian language to the Uighurs in the universities of PRC. Having completely different mental, cultural and linguistic traits, the Uyghurs and the Chinese study in programs that are focused only on the Chinese audience and do not take into account the characteristics of national minorities. The purpose of this study is to consider the basics of a nationally oriented methodology for teaching Russian to Uyghurs in Chinese universities and to propose its pedagogical tools. The materials were the works of scientists on nationally oriented education and methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language, works on the history and culture of the Uyghur people, as well as a survey of Uyghur students and teachers studying and working at Beijing State University. Methods of complex theoretical analysis and questionnaire-diagnostic were used. The cultural and historical path of the Uighurs was analyzed, which determined their mental characteristics, which must be taken into account when developinga nationally oriented methodology. The results of the survey made it possible to identifythe specifics of teaching the Uyghurs the Russian language and to characterize the main difficulties that students face in universities in the PRC. Ways of solving the indicated difficulties were determined by developing a nationally oriented methodology for teaching the Uyghurs the Russian language and its pedagogical tools were proposed. The prospects of the research are the approbation of the proposed foundations for the nationally oriented teaching of the Uighurs in the Russian language in the universities of the PRC and their further development.