Strategies in Interpretation of Culture-Specific Units by Russian EFL Students

The article aims at exploring the importance of strategic behavior for enhancing student comprehension of culture-specific language units. This case study is particularly focused on situation-bound utterances and opportunities for practice in strategy use. The authors present the results involving Russian EFL non-linguistics students to rely on conscious use of three taxonomies of strategies. It analyzes to what extent compositionality, closeness to own culture, and actual situational context help students comprehend and infer the meaning of SBUs in two organized ways of linguistic units’ delivery – contextual and isolated. The article gives evidence on the key role in interpretation process played by context.