Russian as a Foreign Language: Corpus-Informed Approach to Developing Political Science Vocabulary for Advanced Learners

The research is focused on the issue of compiling lexical minimums of Russian as a foreign language for specific purposes, namely political studies, on the basis of a corpus-informed approach. The corpus-oriented research includes investigation of the methods of selecting the appropriate material for the compilation of a representative corpus, dealing with the obtained corpus information with the help of a number of computer tools, and selection of the language material for the further linguodidactic analysis. The aim of the present research is to create a lexical minimum on the basis of the compiled corpus that reflects the current politological discourse, including 6 books on politology that are highly recommended by the leading universities in Russia. Besides, the study aims at developing several methodological accounts of the peculiarities of the most frequent words in order to facilitate foreign students` understanding of the politological context. A quantitative and a qualitative analyses were conducted within the research. The first stage of the quantitative analysis was to process the data so that all the possible digitalization inaccuracy was eliminated. The corpus was also lemmatized and further processed based on the principle of frequency. Therefore, the quantitative analysis is reflected in a number of word lists organized in terms of word frequency parameter. The linguistic analysis of the list of the frequent lemmas justified the need to investigate word collocations within the politological discourse since the specific terminology may be come across among them. The qualitative analysis included the evaluation of such lexical diversity indicators as TTR and lexical coverage that were also contrasted to the corresponding indicators of foreign students` receptive and active lexicon, which resulted in a great discrepancy among the indicators and proved the issue of lexical minimum compilation to be necessary. The following linguodidactic analysis of the collected data was focused on the issues of polysemy, and differentiation of a number of synonyms and paronyms in the politological discourse. The research can also be considered a significant contribution to the existing studies on Russian for specific purposes in the sphere of political studies. The ultimate lexical minimum includes frequent word lists (terms, toponyms, compound prepositions, discursive words and expressions, government patterns (for verbs, adjectives and nouns)) along with several accounts of the differentiation of the most frequent synonymous cases within the politological context. Key words. Lexical minimum, RFL, Russian as a foreign language, Russian for specific purposes, corpus linguistics, political studies, politology