PRAGMATIC INTERFERENCE IN THE ACADEMIC COMMUNICATION OF CHINESE LINGUISTS IN RUSSIAN

Li Juan

The growth of academic mobility from China to Russia has led to an increase in the number of Chinese researchers and students at Russian universities. However, successful professional integration is often hindered by insufficient training in pragmatics; in particular, communicative breakdowns are observed that are caused by pragmatic interference–the transfer of native communicative strategies into Russian. In order to identify typical instances of such interference in academic discourse and to systematise strategies for overcoming them, this study employs methods of contrastive analysis and discourse analysis, case studies of real communicative situations, as well as surveys of Chinese postgraduate students and their Russian academic supervisors. The findings reveal key risk areas and propose a typology of communicative failures with regard to their underlying causes. It is concluded that the targeted development of pragmatic competences enables the mitigation of pragmatic interference and can be achieved through a structured set of instructional strategies that help Chinese linguists adapt their communicative behaviour to the norms of Russian academic etiquette.

Keywords:pragmatic interference; academic discourse; intercultural communication; Russian as a foreign language; Chinese students; face-saving; directness of expression.