Teaching language and culture through the lexical features of Russian proverbs

Abstract

This study explores the educational value of Russian proverbs through the lens of their lexical features, aiming to highlight their potential role in language learning and cultural education. Proverbs, as a concise and rich form of folk wisdom, offer unique opportunities for enhancing linguistic competence and fostering cultural understanding in an educational context. The study seeks to identify the key lexical-semantic groups within proverbs and explore how they can be integrated into language curricula to enrich students' learning experiences. The research utilizes qualitative methods including lexical-semantic analysis, comparison, and generalization. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that in the context of proverbs, a lexical unit not only realizes the meaning recorded in the explanatory dictionary but develops a new one that is not recorded in the literature. A new generalized meaning is formed as a result of distancing from the specific lexical meaning given in the explanatory dictionary. It is the figurative, imaginary, generalized lexical meaning that occupies a special place among all other meanings.