National Discourse Pattern of Russian Texts

Abstract

The article deals with the currently important issue of the influence of mentality and national character on peculiarities of a nation’s mindset, and as a result on the peculiarities of text-building procedure. The author calls such peculiarities of text-building procedure “nationally determined discourse pattern” and gives its definition. In order to identify the peculiarities of the nationally determined discourse pattern typical for Russian-speaking people the author conducted the comparative analysis of Russian-speaking students’ papers, written both in Russian and in English. The process of identifying the features of the discourse pattern was based on a number of typologies of nationally determined mindsets and some national features of Russian people, which were described by several researchers in the spheres of culturology and ethno-psychology. The features of Russian people’s discourse pattern described in the article appear to be very important in teaching foreign languages, since teachers of English have to take these features into consideration while teaching Effective Writing in English to Russian-speaking students.