Associative Portrait of a Russian Student in the Context of the Emergency Transition to Distance Learning

Abstract

With mass digitalization in all spheres of human activity, it is necessary to take a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to understanding and assessing the level of its acceptance and impact. During the pandemic, a lot of research has been done on the topic of digital technologies. Our work reveals new aspects of the issue under study and contributes to a multifaceted analysis from the point of view of socio-psycholinguistics, applying an associative approach to the study of a person’s language experience, his cognitive activity, cognitive “processing” of perceived reality, which materializes in the language experience of an individual. The obtained data are compared with the data of a number of associative dictionaries of the Russian language, which makes it possible to trace the change in these associations over a number of years and create a linguistic portrait of a modern Russian student, get an idea about his image of the world as a whole, his attitude to learning and positioning himself in the future in the light of distance learning experience. The authors also explore the changes in individual and mass consciousness with regard to the study of a foreign language. The article was prepared based on the materials of a two-stage sociological survey among students of RTU MIREA, Moscow (n = 288), who participated voluntarily and anonymously. Their answers created a generalized associative portrait of a Russian student, typical for Moscow. The results obtained can serve as an addition to associative dictionaries.