Infographics as a didactic material in classes of Russian as a foreign language

Abstract

   The article examines such a phenomenon of cognitive visualization as infographics, substantiates its didactic capabilities and suggests options for its use in classes of Russian as a foreign language (RFL). It describes the possibilities of working with ready-made infographic products, as well as the possibilities of creating one’s own product. We provide an example of activities with ready-made infographics in the specialty language classes with a group of students from the Institute of International Relations. A system of preliminary language tasks is proposed, aimed at consolidating and activating grammatical skills (sentence transformation, synonymy of lexical and grammatical models), at expanding the lexical stock and tasks to develop speech skills using infographics (conduct a dialogue, compose a monologue, title an infographic, develop the theme of one of the compositional parts, etc.). Creating one’s own infographics requires the ability to analyze the text not only from the point of view of its content, but also from the point of view of its composition. The article emphasizes that the use of infographics as a didactic material is possible at any stage of language learning and concludes that infographics have a great didactic potential, capable of developing one of the most important types of speech activity – speaking based on the created mental image.