Development of communication skills when teaching Russian as a foreign language (based on Leo Tolstoy’s biography)

   The article presents an authorial method for the development of communicative and speech skills in the lessons of Russian as a foreign language, based on the life and work of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The basic principle of the proposed method is the following: text materials of different genre and style affiliation (a biographical essay, memoirs of contemporaries, diary entries, Tolstoy’s own fictional text) are studied in chronological order. The text-based activities consist of a complex of traditional and innovative forms of tasks. An important element of our approach is linking the proposed tasks to the students’ reflexive and cognitive personal experience. This method makes it possible not only to improve students’ communication and speech skills, but also to expand their lexical stock, linguistic and cultural knowledge. The method strengthens the set of grammatical means necessary to maintain a conversation, express an assessment, opinion and life position in socio-cultural communication. The method, presented in the article, reflects the main ideas of anthropological pedagogy. It is focused on supporting the autonomy of the student’s personality. This method also aims to create conditions ensuring the formation of humanistic value orientations. In general, it can be characterized as a model of subject-subject educational relations between a teacher and a student in a multicultural educational environment. The article emphasizes the equivalence of the two aspects of the educational space and notes the importance of building a psychologically comfortable and humanistic interaction between them. The proposed method is intended for international students studying Russian at an advanced stage.

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