ETHNOREALIA IN THE CONTEXT OF CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The necessity to retain national identity becomes a burning problem for each nation involved in the process of globalization. Specific ethnic characteristics, together with mother tongue, remain the basic means of preserving national spirit of a people. Ethnorealia occur in texts of all functional styles. Their representation in fiction assumes a special function.

The present essay focuses on the implication of ethnographic information in different genres of emotive prose: a fable, a short story, a short novel, a novel. Students studying a foreign language confront the problem of incongruity between “native” and “foreign” cultures, which prevents adequate interpretation of foreign texts. Obtaining by a learner background knowledge of various kinds of a “foreign culture’s” ethnographisms (social, cultural, economic, political) stipulates the ability to decipher the author's point of view expressed in the text. This is revealed in the analysis of several contexts given below.

The functioning of ethnorealia in emotive prose is viewed, on the one hand, as a means of reflecting national identity and, on the other, as a means of promoting cross-cultural communication. Now that globalization has embraced every sphere of human activity, it is very important in teaching a higher school learner of a foreign language to enrich their background knowledge of the culture, history, traditions, etc. of the nation whose language is being studied, thus contributing to a better understanding of their own country’s cultural process. The teacher-philologist should not only encourage a student to read the best samples of world literature, but also teach them to interpret the texts read. This is a complex task consisting of three steps: perception of the text, understanding it, and finally, interpreting it, – that is the ability to verbalize what has been read and understood. Interpretation admits its variety which is stipulated both by the ambivalence of the text itself, and by the individual possibilities of the reader, resulting from their background knowledge.