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Exploring Structure and Salience of Stereotypes about Russia

  • Larisa Nikitina EMAIL logo , Zuraidah Binti Mohd Don and Loh Sau Cheong
Published/Copyright: March 30, 2015
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Summary

Numerous studies have explored images and representations about Russia. For the most part these studies were done in Western socio-cultural and educational contexts. The present article focuses on images about Russia held by learners of Russian in a big public university in Malaysia. Besides exploring the content of the students’ stereotypical representations about Russia this study distinguishes consensual stereotypes and assesses their salience, which has not been done previously. The findings reveal that the students’ representations aligned with popular images about Russia and that the top salient stereotypes about Russia were a “big country” and a “cold country”. The article offers some suggestions about how knowledge of the students’ stereotypes about the target language country could be employed to teach the cultural component of the language program.

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Published Online: 2015-3-30
Published in Print: 2015-4-1

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