The Image of the Teacher of English in Soviet and Post-Soviet Films

Abstract

In the last decades when Russia has entered the process of globalization and internalization we have a wide range of possibilities to travel abroad, to communicate with representatives of other countries and cultures, to collaborate in professional spheres participating in joint projects and events and to gain information, knowledge, and skills wherever published or uploaded. In most cases to succeed in cross-cultural communication or knowledge acquisition, we need English that is considered to be a language of international communication or lingua franca, a language that bridges people. Films play a crucial role in the formation of images as they can raise or damage the prestige of particular professions and create or ruin stereotypes. In recent years there has been considerable interest in studying the image of a teacher in feature films, however, all the researchers have only focused on the teacher image in general. This study is the first to retrace the transformation of English teacher image shown in Soviet and post-Soviet (Russian) films. To achieve the aim the authors use literature review, theoretical analysis and synthesis, descriptive and comparative analyses and historiographical methods. The empirical research is based on the hermeneutical analysis of audiovisual media texts with a particular emphasis on the character analysis. The investigation reveals no significant differences in the transformation of the image between the English teacher and the teacher in general.