ИСТИНА

This report presents the results of a discursive analysis of the essays, written by foreign students studying Russian. The purpose of this analysis is to reveal how students perceive their own ethnic identity in comparison with Russian identity. The self-other dichotomy, reflected in the semantics of the used lexical units and grammatical constructions, forms certain patterns of ethnocultural identity. Such patterns are of interest to us from the point of view of today's cultural and historical context, and also provide an opportunity to compare the perception of Russian identity by representatives of different cultures, since the essays were written by students from different countries of Europe and Asia.