Linguocultural Typology of the Main Errors Made by Russian Speaking Students in Texts in English

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the relation between the mentality of a nation and the peculiarities of their thinking and language. The work has an interdisciplinary nature, as it is written at the intersection of linguistics, linguoculturology and ethnopsychology. Therefore, while conducting the research we used methods of various branches of science: contextual analysis, continuous sampling, comparative analysis, the method of typologization and the descriptive method. The authors consider various typologies of nations and cultures and define the linguistic features typical for the analyzed types. According to the authors, the linguistic features that appear in the written text represent the so-called nationally determined discursive pattern of native speakers of a particular language. Particular attention is paid to the influence of the Russian mentality on the appearance of errors in papers written in a foreign language by native Russian speakers. To be exact, the authors carried a comprehensive analysis of existing errors made by Russian-speaking students while writing texts in the English language (foreign for them). The aim of the study is to develop the linguocultural typology of the main mistakes made by Russian-speaking students while writing texts in English. As a result of the conducted research, three main groups/types of such errors are identified. In conclusion, the authors give the comparison of the characteristics of the native Russian speakers’ nationally determined discursive pattern with the areas where the errors appear. Moreover, the peculiarities of the mentality and national character that influence the occurrence of certain mistakes are defined within the research.