Smirnykh E.V., Spasibukhova A.N.

Orenburg State University, Russia

Relevance of language education in the formation of basic student cultural personality

A language is not only a means of communication but also a powerful instrument of culture comprehension. Humboldt said that “a language is like a nation’s face, it keeps the world picture characteristic to this or that cultural community (“language community”). Having common contents components “conceptual fields of truth” in different languages and cultures have different outline and reflect different aspects of the infinitely diverse world Thus, we can say that studying foreign languages helps us feel our being a part of the world history and at the same time understand deeply our national cultural and historical identity.

In its essence, the linguistic education is a process of movement from target to result. The aim of this process is to teach students a new means of communication, to comprehend a new culture and understand their own ethnic-cultural sources, to cultivate tolerance to other languages and cultural peculiarities of other people. The linguistic education as a process implies student’s subject-object interaction with other languages and cultures while the native language and culture are original in this complicated phenomenon. A student gets the status of an individual in the process of education and cross-cultural communication, i.e. he is considered to be the central element here. It means that it is a student, whose personality and linguistic development opportunities become the starting point in creating and analyzing the content of linguistic education. Practically, student’s underdeveloped multicultural competence can become a serious barrier in their personality self-determination. It also influences negatively their studies. Therefore, the formation of individual integrative quality is of particular importance.

As a language is one of the most significant nation’s characteristic; it is then an integral part of its culture. As a mother tongue of a nation, a language is developed through its culture and reveals it. In a broader sense a culture is a qualitative feature of human activity results.

There is a tendency in modern linguistics to consider a language not only as a communication tool but as a cultural code of a nation too. Fundamental basis of this approach was set up by V. Humboldt, A.A. Potebnya and other scientists. They believed that language boundaries of a nation meant the world outlook boundaries of a certain person. A language reflects all the peculiarities of the nation’s culture; it is specified and unique as it records the whole world of a person in itself.

Linguistic education takes the leading place in the United European Educational Area as languages are considered to provide international cooperation and to bridge interpersonal contacts between people of different countries and different cultures.

Obviously, the prestige of linguistic education has increased nowadays because the importance of intercultural communication and motivation to master foreign languages. Moreover, a lingo-cultural component is considered to be the priority one. The main attention in studying languages moved from the position of “studying languages and cultures” to the position of “studying cultures through languages”.

Linguistic knowledge being formed by the personal experience of human being and being controlled by rules and assessment existed in the society function in the context of its diverse experience. That’s why for a native speaker to recognize a word is to include it in the context of his previous experience, i.e. “in the internal context of various knowledge and relations, determined in culture as the basis for mutual understanding during communication and interaction. Internal context is inseparably connected with individual knowledge, with access to an individual view of the world” [6, p. 200].

Educational process as we have already said must exclusively be directed to accustoming students to a new linguistic code. It should be resulted in student’s developed world outlook with universal and culturally-specified features. The latter can be understood as characteristics of both native linguistic and social environment which the student lives in and as foreign linguistic and environment characteristic to other cultures and languages. Therefore, planning the results in the sphere of both teaching and learning foreign languages we should take into account the categories connected not only with the linguistic but also with social, cultural and emotional experience of students. Since language is a transmission medium of thought and acts as a kind of "package" the knowledge used in the encoding and decoding of language is not limited only by knowledge of the language. This includes knowledge of the world, the social context of speech, as well as the ability to extract the stored information, planning discourse, and more.

We must say that the relations between cultures and languages are a cognitive-pragmatic. A language is a part of culture, its tool, the reality of our spirit, a culture’s image. Moreover, a language is a specific way of culture’s being, a factor of cultural code formation.

A foreign language is “a cross-road- of different cultures, a fact of reporting a foreign language culture, a practice of cross-cultural communication because every foreign word reflects a foreign world and a foreign culture”.(S.G. Ter-Minasova) [7, с.30]

From D.S. Likhachyev’s point of view “learning foreign languages intensifies the sense of a language and first of all the native language”; he considers learning foreign languages to be a bringing-up process [5, c. 358].

Thus, in teaching languages the peculiarity is that it is realized in the dialogue between cultures and the interrelation of cultures in the educational activity leads to fundamental human values accumulation. In co-learning languages and cultures the values bases are following statements:

-a foreign language is a phenomenon of culture;

-a foreign language is an element of culture;

-a foreign language is a cross-road of culture;

- a foreign language is a means of reporting culture.

The aim of teaching foreign languages in universities will be achieved only when the process of its learning becomes the phenomenon of accustoming to foreign culture and the language itself – a key to a dialogue between cultures. This idea was written in the National Doctrine of Education, «The system of education must provide the upbringing of Russia’s patriots, …having ethnic and religious tolerance, respecting languages, customs traditions and culture of other nations. It also must provide the development students’ world outlook and culture of interpersonal relations”.

According to this document the system of education is called to solve the most urgent problem of nowadays – the problem of tolerance to other nation’s culture. Therefore, the main task of linguistic education in universities is to give students an idea that any language is universal in expressing people’s communication needs, developing respectful attitude to other nations’ languages and cultures in this way. Any teaching process should be based on the dialogue between historically existing ways of mutual understanding, logics, cultures. We agree with M.M. Bakhtin’s opinion that “a person can show off for himself and for other people only in communication, in interactions between nations… A personality is there where there is a dialogue” [1, c. 40]. “In the process of a dialogue appears a special communication between people which helps to intuitively find their own view of the world”[2, c. 32]

Literature

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