For the first time in Ivanovo, the Ivanovo University of Chemical Technology hosted the International Student Conference "Russian at the Turn of the Millennium"at the end of last year. 2001 was not only the first year of the new century, the third millennium, but also the year of the world's languages, as decided by the Council of Europe. The linguistic student conference was dedicated to this big event. It is noteworthy that it was held in a technical higher educational institution, because one of the goals of this event was to draw attention to the problems of the Russian language specifically non-philological students, whose curricula included the new discipline "Russian language and speech culture".

The idea of holding such a conference found a wide response: the organizing committee of the conference received more than 120 applications for participation from students and postgraduates from near and far abroad (Finland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan), major cities of Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Yekaterinburg, Volgograd, Vladimir, Magnitogorsk, Surgut, Kursk). International students and postgraduates studying at Russian universities, including Ivanovo, and representing such countries as China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, Nepal, Senegal, Cameroon, etc. took an active part in the conference.

The conference program included both plenary and breakout sessions. The plenary reports covered various aspects of the functioning of the Russian language and issues of speech culture in society: the geopolitical situation in our country and the activities of the Peace Foundation to strengthen the position of the Russian language

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(G. A. Kuzmina), the word as an element of the spiritual culture of the nation (Abbot Augustin), speech technique and mastery as an effective means of successful communication (actor V. A. Alexandrovsky), the place of language in electronic and print media (N. B. Egoshina). The reports of teachers and students were devoted to the issues of teaching Russian to a foreign audience, in a foreign cultural environment, the problem of motivation in learning Russian as a foreign language, etc.

In the section "Word and text in the Russian language system", a large number of reports were made on Russian phraseology. Some of them considered general problems of phraseological semantics, while others described thematic groups of phraseological units in literary works and newspaper publications. There were also reports on the analysis of the language of the literary text (based on the prose of I. Turgenev, V. Nabokov, etc.), Russian folklore, etc.

The section "Dynamics of the language norm and modern speech culture" actively discussed changes in public language practice, lexical and stylistic innovations in modern Russian, and their manifestations in information genres. Special attention was paid to identifying the sociolinguistic causes of language evolution. Much interest was aroused by reports that examined the features of" fashion communication " (youth slang, English - American borrowings, advertising slogans, new phrase-making, language game, etc.), as well as certain aspects of modern business communication (in particular, telephone conversations). A number of reports addressed the issues of comparative historical rhetoric, described various "speech canons" that were formed in antiquity, in the Soviet period of Russian history (the so-called "newspeak"), as well as in the modern era of socio-economic transformations and the formation of a new paradigm of culture.

The peculiarity of the third section - "The Russian language as a means of interethnic communication" -was that specific phenomena of language and speech were presented as part of the spiritual culture of the people, including on the material of literary and artistic creativity. The reports presented here covered a fairly wide range of problems of intercultural communication, which were considered in linguistic, philosophical, cultural, psychological and pedagogical aspects. Such issues as the interaction of language and culture, the originality of the "linguistic worldview" of the people, the achievement of speech efficiency in the context of a dialogue of cultures, the national and cultural specifics of nonverbal means of communication, problems of conceptual semantics, text interpretation and comparative analysis of languages were discussed.

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The conference included a seminar of teachers of the Russian language departments of our city, where they discussed the implementation of the Federal Target Program "Russian Language", the main activities of ROPRYAl, the new university discipline" Russian language and Speech Culture " and other topical issues of teaching Russian.

L. N. Mikheeva, Candidate of Philological Sciences,

E. V. Ataeva

Ivanovo

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