An Investigation into the Linguistic-Cultural Interference in the Application of Stable Comparisons

Paying attention to the culture-centered feature of language is a key point in the foreign language teaching. Language is a tool for transmitting culture, and at the same time, no language survives without culture. Language and culture are interrelated, and individual’s ability to learn a language is to a great extent dependent on his/her understanding level or his mastery of the culture. The lack of paying attention to the cultural aspects of language leads to the linguistic mistakes. As a highly-applied layer, the stable comparisons has been placed at the phraseological level of language, completely reflects the speakers’ viewpoints and cognition, and contains cultural codes. Ignoring this generative and highly applied linguistic layer and cultural codes defined therein will bring about linguistic-cultural interference. Using a comparative-analytic method as well as designating and administering a test, this study endeavors to investigate the ability of Iranian students of Russian Language in the recognition and mastery of this linguistic units and to further present some implications based on the results.