Plovdiv – In foreign language educational environment

The poster summarizes the results of the series of training seminars held in a foreign language environment. As a central part of the activities is the realized associative experiment, which allows observing the process of formation of a secondary linguistic personality; composing features of the interweaving of the elements in the structure of the linguistic picture of the world; tracing the peculiar layering of cognitive data and researching the specifics of the national culture in the mind of students during the reception of a foreign language. The associative experiment is, by its nature, a current educational method, especially in the context of the relationship between language and culture and the emphasis on multicultural education.

An associative experiment was included in the training, based on the idea of the fundamental unity of the psychological basis of association and the semantic components of meaning, rereading in its way the method of associative. It is important to explain that our understanding of an association is a mental connection that arises between representations, is based on individual subjective experience, but is directly related to the social cognition of the individual. Each of the existing types of the associative experiment is designed to solve a certain set of pre-set problems and, accordingly, has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, in our opinion, the directed associative experiment helps to obtain specific reactions having certain characteristics, but in this way, the process of association is relatively limited and to some extent controlled by the researcher, which can lead to subjective results.In our research, we have used a free-associative experiment of the principle – S (stimulus) – R (reactions). Based on the quantity laid down in Kent and Rozanov's model, we selected 100 stimulus words (50 adjectives, and 50 nouns related to the city of Plovdiv). The selection of lexemes took into account the fact that the respondents were foreigners and included only words that are part of the initial level of language proficiency. The results from the experiment allow us, from the point of view of semantics, to generalize the received reactions into some classification groups. A summary of the data is presented in this poster. In conclusion, the experiment allowed us to outline both the achieved effect of the interactive learning method and to see the specific features of the interweaving of cognitive structures in the minds of foreign learners.

The authors express sincere gratitude to the Scientific Research Fund at the Ministry of Education and Science and the "Scientific and Project Activity" Division at Plovdiv University "PaisiiHilendarski" for the assistance provided.