Практические задания

1. Divide the following objects, events and phenomena into groups: a) ethnic; b) historical cultural, c) semiotic; d) sociocultural; use these words and phrases in your own situation.

Oatmeal porridge, “No Trespassing”, “The Melting Pot”, turkey, Franklin D.Roosevelt, “Every family has a black sheep”, steak or beef roast, semidetached house, Foot Guards, W. Churchill, “No fishing”, “Cameras and camera phones prohibited”, hedges, cricket, the British Museum, “Seeing is believing”, kilt, lawn, Mother’s Day, “Danger. Deep water”, lobster, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, megapolis, the essence of punctuality, condominium, Margaret Thatcher, the Statue of Liberty, Nelson Column, May Day dance, City, Tory Party, 5 o’clock tea, good manners.

2. Study the following information and define what lack of background knowledge influences.

a) My encounter in the seventies with this widening knowledge gap first caused me to recognize the connection between specific background knowledge and mature literacy. The research I was doing on the reading and writing abilities of college students made me realize two things. First, we cannot assume that young people

today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture. For instance, in one experiment, conducted in Richmond, Virginia, our seventeen- and eighteen-year-old subjects did not know who Grant and Lee were. Second, our results caused me to realize that we cannot treat reading and writing as empty skills, independent of specific knowledge. The reading skill of a person may vary greatly from task to task. The level of literacy exhibited in each task depends on the relevant background information that person possesses.

The lack of wide-ranging background information among young men and women now in their twenties and thirties is an important cause of the illiteracy that large corporations are finding in their middle-level executives.

b) New research has shown that reading doesn’t follow an orderly pattern, as used to be thought. .. .The reader’s mind is constantly inferring meanings that are not directly stated by the words of a text but are nonetheless part of its essential content. The explicit meanings of a piece of writing are the tip of an iceberg of meaning; the larger part lies below the surface of the text and is composed of the reader’s own relevant knowledge. Such background knowledge is a far more important ingredient in the reading process than earlier theoretical accounts had supposed. Thus, to make sense of what we read, we must use relevant prior knowledge to form a model of how sentence meanings hang together.

(E.D. Hirsch. Cultural Literacy)

3 Define what reality / event is described in the following extract. Discuss with your group mates what cultural tradition is described in this extract and what the cultural conceptual sense of the reality /event is; comment on it.

...The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain. Many, however linger in a disguised form. The M-D dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or ‘club walking’, as it was there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott, though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the members being solely women....

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns - a gay survival from Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms - days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in processional march of two and two round the parish.

.. .In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left hand a bunch of white flowers. The peeling of the former and the selection of the latter, had been of personal care.

They were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, but the young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold, and black, and brown. .. .the club having

entered the allotted place, dancing began. As there were no men in the company the girls danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village, together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round the spot, and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.

(T. Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles)

4 Watch some episodes from the film “The Honey-Mooners” / “A Trap for parents”; while watching them pick out culturally specific realities and components of the background knowledge; give the interpretation of them. Tell how the background knowledge influences the understanding of the situation of the communication (discourse). Reproduce these episodes, using words and phrases denoting these realities.

Рекомендуемая литература

Крюков, A.H. Фоновые знания и языковая коммуникация / А.Н. Крюков // Этнопсихолингвистика. - М.: Наука, 1988. - С. 19-34.

Леонтович, О.А. Россия и США. Введение в межкультурную коммуникацию / О.А. Леонтович. - Волгоград: «Перемена», 2003. - С. 35, 45, 54-55, 77-78.

Фурманова, В. П. Межкультурная коммуникация и лингвокультуроведение в теории практике обучения иностранному языку / В.П. Фурманова. - Изд-во Мордовск. ун-та, 1993. - С. 60-77.