Corpus technologies in studying cultural concepts in RFL classes: The concept of happiness

The integration of digital language resources into the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) opens up new opportunities for developing linguocultural competence in foreign students. The National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRL) is a unique repository of authentic texts of various genres and styles, but its didactic potential in studying cultural concepts remains insufficiently explored. The problem lies in the absence of methodologically grounded approaches to using the NCRL and related corpus tools (AntConc, Sketch Engine, OpenCorpora) for systematic work with key concepts of Russian culture in a foreign-language audience. The aim of the article is to develop and experimentally verify a methodology for using corpus technologies in studying the concept of HAPPINESS by foreign students at level B2. The research methods include theoretical analysis of scientific literature on conceptology and RFL methodology, corpus analysis (frequency, collocational, contextual), pedagogical experiment with 58 students, questionnaires, and statistical data processing (Student’s t-test, Cohen’s coefficient). The results showed a statistically significant advantage of the experimental group trained according to the author’s methodology using corpus technologies over the control group following the traditional program: the final increase was 34.4 points versus 14.5 (t(56) = 11.42, p < 0.001, d = 3.04). The most pronounced effect was recorded in the formation of corpus-information skills (an increase of 11.9 points) and linguocultural competence (an increase of 8.7 points). The conclusions confirm that the systematic use of corpus technologies ensures a deep understanding of cultural concepts, the development of research skills, and sustained motivation to learn RFL. The proposed methodology can be implemented in curricula for Russian as a foreign language at level B2.

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