Common Youth Argot in Teaching of French as a Foreign Language in Higher Education

The article is devoted to the description of the status of French common youth argot and to the substantiation for including specific lexical continuum elements in French language teaching for future specialists in the field of translation, theory and methodology of teaching foreign languages and cultures. The relevance of the present research is due to the fact that the development of methods for working with argotic vocabulary is becoming increasingly important: specialized editions are published on a regular basis; textbooks of French as a foreign language contain a significant number of non-conventional lexemes, including argotisms. The purpose of the study is to determine the mechanism for identifying the elements of an uncodified vocabulary and the most demanded content of the French common youth sociolect for its subsequent inclusion in the teaching of French as a foreign language in higher education. Corpus linguistics methods, including automated information retrieval, text searches in large corpora (concordances), as well as the comparative method were used. At the same time, the leading one was the matrix clustering method, developed on the basis of the sequential filter method, but differing from it by a convergent approach to language material collection. The results obtained in the research allowed us to identify the most demanded common youth argotisms. The formed representative corpora of the French common youth argot lexemes can be successfully used to improve the level of professional skills of future teachers and translators of French. The collected language material will form the basis for the development of an elective or optional “French common youth argot” course at the language faculty.