THE EMPLOYMENT OF THE ROYAL SPANISH ACADEMY REFERENCE POINTS IN TEACHING RUSSIAN STUDENTS

The Spanish language is currently among the most sought-after foreign languages in the Russian system of higher education, and a large number of educational materials are available to ensure the teaching of it. That said, the recent decades have brought about considerable changes in the approaches to defining the Spanish language norm. With the publishing of fundamental works by the Royal Spanish Academy as well as the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, the aforementioned have to be taken into account in the classroom. The goal of this research is to evaluate the accessibility of the Royal Spanish Academy reference points in Russia and the possibility of their employment in the process of education. The Academy website's resources were analysed; a particular focus was dedicated to the operation of «Español al día», an information bureau, as well as the consulting services provided by the Twitter social media platform with a #RAEconsultas hashtag. Also, within the scope of this research is the ability to acquaint oneself with the following articles on the Academy website: Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, Diccionario de americanismos and, certainly, Diccionario de la Real Academia Española. The research indicates that the Russian students who have already grasped the advantages of Gramota.ru (http://www.gramota.ru/), an Internet portal, providing real-time information on the norms of the Russian language, are similarly fluent with the Royal Spanish Academy websites and are capable of finding the necessary information. The conducted analysis can be applied to the classroom language studies with 2-4-year students when working with mass media or writing scholarly work in Spanish. It is important to point out that due the relatively low accessibility of print publications by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language in Russia, their respectable websites are an invaluable source of relevant information for many language tutors.