New Perspectives in Science Education

The reading plays a key role in the process of teaching Russian to foreign students. They have the integrated task to learn Russian with the help of literary texts and at the same time to improve their language while reading these texts. Thus, the reading is both the means of the studying and the goal of it. In the methodology of teaching foreign languages (Russian as a foreign one) the researchers of the effectiveness of the teaching process have to seek answers to the two fundamental questions: “What to teach?” and “How to teach?”. “What to teach?” is still actual: the language is gradually but constantly changing and these changes find the reflection in texts of different types. The literary texts are not the exception: they capture all these language changes. Recently “How to teach?” was not so rapid: the methodology had rather full description of different methods and technologies of teaching. But the last months’ events have shown us that there are still some problems to be solved. It is clear that the distance and mixed learning technologies will develop and change the established concepts of teaching foreign languages. The group of the researchers of Pushkin State Russian Language Institute analyzed the above-mentioned initial data and began to work on improving the model of teaching reading as a type of speech activities to foreign students of philology within Russian as a foreign language in modern informational conditions. The following tasks were defined to achieve the goal: the sampling of modern literary texts to foreign students of philology;  the generating of task system to improve lexical and grammatical skills based on a read text;  the generating of task system to develop an ability of the skilful reading aimed at understanding not only the general idea of the text but the meaning of it, the context and subtext;  the generating of task system aimed at developing productive speech activities related to the reading: “reading – writing”, “reading – speaking”;  the presentation of the task system in the electronic format, the analysis of the means provided to students and teachers by this format of classes for teaching and studying in terms of promoting the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages of e-learning. The generated model of teaching reading should be organically integrated into the whole teaching system for foreign students of philology and should form meta-subject links. The developed materials are being tested in the groups of foreign students (from Europe and Asia) at the philological faculty at Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. The e-format of classes helps to get statistical data on the success of the course, to judge its effectiveness.

Keywords: e-learning, reading, speech activity, foreign students.