What Makes a Language?
When a teacher of a foreign language teaches their subject, they focus on basic language skills - reading, listening, writing and speaking. Whether a student learns Russian, English or French their ability to speak and understand a foreign language is based on these four areas. But are they the only components of a language? The truth is that what is equally important is the culture of the country.
Culture and language have often been described as inseparable. Language isn’t just the sum total of words, grammatical principles and sentence construction, but also unique cultural norms, social systems, history and traditions. Understanding cultural-specific contexts is as important as mastering grammar and vocabulary.
But what are the best ways to learn about the culture of the country of the language being studied?
Fairy Tales
Working with younger students I always start with fairy tales. Every Russian child is familiar with the witch called Baba Yaga, the dragon Zmei Gorynich and with Snegurochka - the granddaughter of Ded Moroz. When I showed children a tale about Kolobok from the Mountain of gems project (it wasn't part of my Russian lesson, so both native and non-native students were watching it in English), non-natives were highly impressed by the ending - it shows the uniqueness of the culture of all countries and importance of studying it. During my lessons I often use Russian fairy tales - it is a good chance not only to learn about folklore, but also to learn and practise new vocabulary and train listening skills.
History and legends
Traditional holidays are also an important part of culture - Maslenitsa is one of the oldest Eastern Slavic holidays and its celebration at school was a perfect chance for me to conduct thematic lessons about the history of the Rus and pagan origins of Maslenitsa with older students: familiarisation with historical articles and watching fragments of Knyaz Vladimir (2005) allowed children to appreciate the new information and practise their reading and listening. Younger students had a lesson about Russian pancakes, and the fact that the whole school were wearing traditional Eastern Slavic costumes, played games and ate blini during the celebration, only made the studying more effective. Actually, even non- traditional holidays may become an occasion to teach children about traditional culture - for the school celebration of Halloween I conducted the lessons about Eastern Slavic evil spirits, deities and other mythological characters and Sirin’s Song (2022) by SKAZ acted as an excellent illustration for the topic.
Artistic culture
Films and cartoons may be one of the ways to tell the fairytale or the legend and cinematography itself is an important part of Russian culture. Children are unlikely to appreciate world-famous masterpieces of Soviet cinema, but non native students enjoy the same cartoons as native ones: Smeshariki (known in English as Kikoriki), Umka (2022) and other series. In the beginning of the term, both native and non native students were welcomed to watch Cheburashka at the cinema (2022) - the film was in Russian without subtitles, but children liked it anyway and it was a good chance for them to listen to the Russian speech and intonation for 2 hours; something that is useful even without full understanding of the meaning.
As for Russian literature, it is a little bit early even for students of Year 8/9 to read Dostoyevsky or Zamyatin, but fragments of adapted texts can be used in lessons to practise reading. Touching on the topic of Russian music, it may be studied through the analysis of lyrics, which is a good chance to practise listening, reading and speaking skills.
Another important part of understanding the culture of a country is the opportunity to live in it - students have the chance to communicate in Russian outside school, to read signs on the street and menus at the restaurant, as well as visiting theatres and concerts. Watching movies in the original language develops listening skills. Literature and historical articles advances not only reading, but speaking and writing as you discuss and analyse them. Therefore it is not only inefficient to teach students just grammar and vocabulary, but also almost impossible, because language and culture are inseparable from each other.
Miss Irina, Russian as an Additional Language Teacher
