The study of the role of context in sociocultural discourse interpretation through the discursive-cognitive approach

This paper explores the process of comprehension within intercultural communication; the factors that affect the success of the authentic discourse interpretation by Russian learners of English; and the causes of communicative failures in interaction between representatives of different cultures. The discursive-cognitive approach focuses on a foreign language as an object of study and comprehension, as well as on the study of cognitive processes responsible for communication activity. The paper presents an experimental study of the cognitive processes of English lexical expressions and discourse fragments interpretation by Russian students. The hypothesis of the study is the assumption that if the verbal expression has a socio-cultural load, the inference becomes an even more complex cognitive challenge in the situation of intercultural communication. The experimental study was carried out on lexical units and cognitive-discursive fragments of the contemporary American English language. The research aimed at studying the substantive aspects of foreign language authentic spoken discourse acquisition; identifying the impact of context on the students' understanding of lexical units; identifying the factors that determine the interpretation process and its success. Empirical data have shown the important role of contextual factors and socio-cultural information for the success of an authentic foreign language discourse comprehension. Situation-bound utterances given in the situational context contributed to the optimization of the perception process that promotes the analysis and synthesis of all the characteristics of a word as a means of language and its environment (the actual situational context). The study proved that the causes of communication failure in a situation of intercultural foreign language communication are the following: 1) inadequate perception of linguistic and extralinguistic factors of communication; 2) imperfect mechanism of perception, interpretation and comprehension of the foreign language discourse; 3) insufficient volume of culture-loaded receptive and productive vocabulary of students; 4) lack of perceptual experience; 5) lack of discursive-cognitive experience that promotes awareness of the difference of cultures and languages as well as different / varied ways of speech activity to infer an adequate meaning of a foreign language utterance. These data confirm the hypothesis and reveal interesting features of the cognitive-discursive activity within intercultural communication; however, due to the complexity of the phenomenon the study requires further development.

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