Cultural-Linguistic Aspect of Teaching and Learning Spanish Colour Idioms and Symbols

Abstract

The article argues that idiomatic competence should receive considerable attention during the process of foreign language acquisition because of the modern processes of European integration, which are putting forward a priority task for technical education and some fields of humanitarian one – training the future specialists to function professionally under the conditions of multicultural environment. Thus, the main purpose of foreign language teaching is to form the understanding of all psychological peculiarities of another national culture representative. The main objective of this article is to show the effectiveness of the acquisition of foreign language skills in the unity of language and culture, that was proved on the basis of the results obtained during the experimental Spanish training of 1 and 2 year students of Odessa National Polytechnic University in 2018-2019 academic year. The object of the experiment is the linguistic units denoting the colour spectrum in Spanish. To optimise the training process the corresponding verbal-oriented stages were outlined. The process of teaching Spanish idioms related to colour contains three stages. The first stage considers units whose cultural and linguistic fields coincide. The second one concerns more complex units denoting the shades of colours, which are formed in different ways in the compared languages. The third stage represents the Spanish phraseological units, whose metaphorical meanings are both far from the direct one and logical assessment of the relevant notions. The units of such kind should be taught successively by gradually increasing their complexity.