From cultural to pedagogical scripts: Speaking out in English, French, and Russian

Abstract

In recent times, significant progress has been made in our understanding of what appears to be the best way to articulate unfamiliar cultural knowledge migrants and language learners should ideally internalise if they wish to successfully interact with native speakers of their new language, who either take such knowledge for granted or are at least aware of it. Instead of relying on 'cultural scripts', which reflect the insider perspective of native speakers and have traditionally been written in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), of which Minimal English is an offshoot, several authors have proposed to rewrite the same information in the form of so-called pedagogical scripts, using Minimal English as a more user-friendly alternative to NSM. This chapter uses pedagogical scripts written in Minimal English to familiarise migrants and language learners with the importance of Russian iskrennost' (roughly, 'sincerity') and French prise de position (roughly, 'taking a stand').