Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language Today Through an Intercultural Approach: Challenges and New Directions

This book is devoted to the topic of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) from an intercultural perspective with special attention to the university context and Italian-speaking students. It is underpinned by three main aims. The first is to provide the reader with a theoretical-operational framework on intercultural RFL teaching, giving him/her the methodological tools to study this area and/or to apply it to his/her own teaching. The second is to promote a critical awareness among readers of the dominant ideologies and discourses underlying both academic research on the subject and the teaching materials themselves, so as to enable them to take note of the problems of RFL intercultural teaching (compared to the issues of foreign language education of other languages) and attempt to overcome them, with a view to enhancing teacher learning/development. The third—more general—aim seeks to help the reader look at the RFL area as if through a lens that shows different angles and shades, thus leading to greater understanding of the complexity of teaching and learning processes as a whole. The study discloses the ideological nature of RFL intercultural teaching by investigating its national and cultural essentialist discourses and advocates a pluricentric and complex image of the Russian-speaking cultural space which is rather new for the field, where static, mythologized, and uncritical ideas and representations of identity and culture (e.g., “Russian soul”) still prevail to this day.