Teaching and Testing Sociopragmatics in the Russian Language Classroom

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of sociolinguistic and pragmatic features in the teaching and testing processes of Russian as a foreign language with Austrian university students. Teachers of Russian seem to have a preference for linguistic competences, such as phonetics, morphology, syntax and lexis, hereby neglecting or even ignoring sociopragmatic features ? especially when testing students’ achievement or proficiency on various competence levels. This paper presents suggestions for how to move from awareness-raising exercises to communicative tasks in order to strengthen the students’ sociopragmatic skills; furthermore it discusses the role of various forms of authenticity in the Russian language classroom, such as competence authenticity and voice authenticity, among others. Teachers wanting to improve students’ communicative competence need to be made aware of the fact that incorporating sociopragmatic features into their teaching and testing is not so much dependent on the choice of material, but rather on what they are going to do with it. It is acceptable to use adapted or stylized material besides authentic texts in class in order to generate authentic performances in which students can demonstrate an understanding of sociopragmatic skills.