Culturological Aspects of Concepts: Experiment and Practice at Tertiary Level

Abstract

: The paper is devoted to cultural concepts and the importance of understanding and handling the concepts in the right way. Being a culturally determined unit of communication the concepts play an extremely important role in learning the mental content of a foreign culture. Introducing the analysis of the concept structure into foreign language teaching will help future specialists to integrate into their multicultural professional community. Different approaches are used when studying concepts at tertiary level. At the first stage, it is important to find out the learners’ level of understanding the concepts, then they are introduced to the history of the concept and exposed to authentic texts explaining or illustrating it. Completing different tasks helps the learners to acquire the skill of using the concept. As the experiment showed the Russian-speaking students have certain difficulties in understanding concepts of other cultures. Analysis and discussion of concepts as well as a number of tasks are helpful to improve students’ cultural awareness.