Taboo vocabulary in the system of teaching RFL to philologists: linguocultural aspect

Abstract

Today, the linguocultural approach to teaching RFL is considered the most promising and significant. Every culture has words that native speakers avoid either subconsciously or consciously. These forbidden words reflect the cultural characteristics of a particular nation; they are a necessary component of a linguistic personality and are directly related to formation and functioning of a conceptual picture of the world of a particular ethnic group. Mastering a language is impossible without understanding the culture of the people being studied, and taboo vocabulary is, of course, a significant part of our language and culture. The article presents an attempt to consider the taboo vocabulary of the modern Russian language from the point of view of the necessity and the possibility of teaching it in the RFL course for foreign philology students. In particular, there is a change in the causes of emergence of modern speech taboos: if earlier the main reason for taboos was fear, then today we are talking about psycholinguistic changes in society related to the general orientation towards tolerance, providing all members of society with equal opportunities. Nowadays, this is the main reason for the taboo on certain words. In addition, the author argues that taboo topics will not be the same for intra-communication and intercultural communication (as an example, we can talk about negative ethnic stereotypes). Finally, the RFL teacher is asked the question: should a taboo vocabulary be discussed in class with foreign students? And if so, what is the mechanism for teaching “forbidden” words? The author concludes that, despite some exotic themes, knowledge of the vocabulary tabooed in our culture is extremely important for foreign students, as it will help them not in the predictable atmosphere of the university, but in real life. Obviously, in the system of teaching taboo vocabulary, it is advisable to use the system of language and speech tasks, pretext, text and posttext tasks that is familiar to teachers. As an illustration, the author offers samples of several such exercises, noting that not only sentences modeled by the teacher, but also adapted texts of different styles of speech can serve as examples.