Larisa Nikitina

“A Distant Land of Snow …”: Russian Language Learners’ Representations of Russia

Abstract Extensive research has been done on language learners’ perceptions and representations of the target language country, culture and speaking community. However, first of all, there is a lack of such studies in the context of Russian language teaching and learning. Secondly, no attempts have been made in the previous studies to quantitatively assess the favourabillity of the country images held by the language learners. The present study addresses these gaps in research literature. It employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the content of Russian language learners’ stereotypical representations of Russia and to assess favourability of these stereotypes. The findings indicate that the students’ representations of Russia were predominantly positive though their knowledge about the country was limited. The study offers a discussion on pedagogical implications of its findings.

Language learners’ representations of Spanish-speaking countries: How can they inform language pedagogy?

A number of studies have focused on language learners’ images of Spain and Spanishspeaking countries, however, none of these investigations was conducted in an Asian educational context. The current study has addressed this gap in research literature. It investigated not only representations but also salience and favourability of students’ images of the target language countries, which has not been done in earlier studies. The respondents were 31 beginner learners of Spanish. Firstly, they were asked to write images that they have about Spain; secondly, they were asked to write the names of Spanish-speaking countries that they know and provide several images for each of these countries. In addition, the students were asked to assign a favourability rating to each of the images in their lists. The findings revealed that the language learners’ images of Spain were multifarious and had a richer structure compared to the representations of Latin American countries. Despite this difference, students had predominantly positive attitudes toward Spanish-speaking countries. The article concludes by discussiong how language learners’ representations of a target language country can inform language pedagogy and offers some practical suggestions.

A longitudinal study of language learners’ images about Russia

Abstract Several studies in the field of applied linguistics have explored images held by language learners about a target language country. However, for the most part, these studies focused on learners of modern European languages, such as German, Spanish and French and they were conducted in Western educational contexts. Besides, none of the previous investigations attempted to conduct a systematic classification of the language learners’ images. The present longitudinal study addressed these gaps in the research literature. It explored images about Russia held by Malaysian learners of the Russian language in a large university in East Malaysia. This article reports the findings of three questionnaire surveys conducted in 2004, 2007 and 2010. It was found that the images about Russia held by the participants were diverse and clustered around eight countryrelated aspects. Content of some categories of images was stable and changed little over time. Other categories were more fluid and more prone to change. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications that can be derived from the findings.

Language learners’ representations of Portugal: implications for culture teaching / Las representaciones de Portugal de los estudiantes de portugués: implicaciones en la enseñanza de aspectos culturales

Abstract This pedagogically-oriented study investigated cultural representations of Portugal held by 29 learners of Portuguese in a large public university in Malaysia. The main purpose of this study was to demonstrate how these representations could be employed for teaching the cultural component of the Portuguese language programme. During the content analysis, representations of Portugal provided by the respondents were divided into 11 categories. The study then assessed salience and favourability of each category of images. The findings revealed that the language learners’ representations of Portugal were for the most part positive. The images referring to Portuguese people formed the largest and most salient category. Overall, the students’ representations of Portugal tended to be simplistic and included ubiquitous stereotypes. A discussion of pedagogical implications arising from these findings concludes the article.

INVESTIGATING STEREOTYPES ABOUT THE TARGET LANGUAGE COUNTRY: A CASE OF GERMAN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Los alumnos traen a la clase una multitud de estereotipos sobre la lengua a estudiar, la cultura y tambien sobre los hablantes nativos. Reconociendo el importante papel que estos juegan en el proceso de aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera, se han llevado a cabo varias investigaciones que han explorado los estereotipos que los estudiantes de idiomas poseen. En su mayor parte, estos estudios fueron de caracter cualitativo y se centraron principalmente en el contenido de los estereotipos. No existen suficientes estudios que examinen la frecuencia y la relevancia de los estereotipos que se han divulgado entre los estudiantes de aleman. Los actuales metodos-mixtos se encargan de estudiar estos vacios. Se ha extendido la investigacion sobre los estereotipos en el campo de la linguistica aplicada para explorar cualitativamente el contenido y evaluar cuantitativamente la relevancia de las imagenes estereotipadas en los alumnos de idiomas. Este estudio se realizo con alumnos principiantes de la lengua alemana en una gran universidad en Malasia. Los resultados revelaron que los estereotipos de los estudiantes sobre Alemania incluian referencias deportivas, cientificas, tecnologicas, industriales, culturales, historicas, sobre su gente, su lenguaje, su geografia y la riqueza culinaria. El estereotipo mas representativo fue el futbol, los automoviles, la tecnologia, la ingenieria, Volkswagen y las grandes industrias. La mayoria de los estudiantes tenian estereotipos muy positivos con respecto a Alemania.

A Look at a Small Classroom in a Big University: Through a Metaphor, Vividly / Živopisni pogled u malu učionicu na velikom sveučilištu: uz pomoć metafore

In educational research literature there are two influential metaphors about learning. They describe this process as either “acquisition” or “participation” (Sfard, 1998). These metaphors have been widely used by scholars, researchers and educators. However, the students’ perspectives on learning have been underexplored. This article addresses this gap in research literature and examines metaphors about learning created by a group of foreign language learners in a big public university in East Malaysia. The findings indicate universality of people’s perceptions about learning and reveal the presence of both the “acquisition” and “participation” metaphors in the students’ images. The study considers the implications of the findings for language pedagogy.