Psycholinguistic study of the attitude of French and Russian students to Internationalization in Higher Education

Abstract

The article describes the first stage of the realization of a complex psycholinguistic associative experiment in French and Russian. The aim of this experiment is to identify associative fields of words describing the attitude of young people towards multiculturalism, academic mobility and internationalization of higher education in target cities – Novosibirsk and Tomsk in Siberia (Russia), Montpellier and Bordeaux in France. The associative experiment will supplement sociological and other studies and will allow us to show the respondents’ naive views on various words describing certain aspects of students’ life. Associative experiments are considered to be a reliable method to identify conscious and unconscious meanings of words. Thus, the “language consciousness of the individual” (a concept intro cholinguistic point of view) becomes visible to the external observer. The analysis of the most stable and repetitive reactions of a large number of participants makes it possible to infer the collective opinion. After processing the results of the experiment, a fragment of the associative network modeling the lexicon of French and Russian students in this subject area will be obtained.

Keywords

psycholinguistics, university town, word association, French language, Russian language