Univerbates in modern conversational speech in light of teaching Russian as a foreign lanuage

the article deals with teaching foreign students of linguistics to recognize and use univerbates in everyday conversation. Univerbates are widely represented in modern oral communication. Familiarization of foreign students of linguistics with peculiarities of formation and usage of this layer of conversational lexis is absolutely crucial for teaching Russian as a foreign language and makes a great contribution to the formation of cultural competency which allows for adequate reception and production of oral texts. The communicative and competency-based approaches define the goal of learning a foreign language as the capacity for cross-cultural communication, that is why teaching materials for Russian as a foreign language must be aimed not only at normative and formal written speech, but at acquisition of colloquial variants of the language which are regularly used by native speakers in their everyday speech as well. Teaching based on the training package developed by the authors of this article is to result in the following: the students students of linguistics will know the principles of univerbation, be able to recognize univerbates in written and oral speech, understand the attitude of the speaker/writer based on the context and adequately assess it and the acceptability of the read or heard usage of a univerbate in the given situation and react appropriately.

univerbates, word formation, informal speech, teaching Russian as a foreign language, communicative and competency-based approach, word meaning, semantization, conversation practice