PROJECT ACTIVITY AS AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO FORM COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCIES IN THE LESSONS OF RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article presents the experience of organizing the educational process using multimodal social media. The purpose of the study is to describe the possibilities of new technologies in the classroom in Russian as a foreign language for the study of vocabulary of different thematic groups, grammar, speech genres, and the development of oral and written speech skills. Firstly, this is a project to develop a travelogue. The essence of the project is an invitation to travel around the native places of students using the multimodal text of the travelogue as a learning unit as the basis for organizing the teaching of oral and written speech in a foreign language. At an advanced stage of teaching philologists, the work on creating a booktrailer is effective as a creative group task of a project type for the analysis of a literary text. With the help of such work, several educational and didactic tasks are solved at once. Step-by-step tasks for creating a training booktrailer and requirements for its evaluation are given.

Extended abstract:

The article deals with the experience of organizing the education process with the usage of multimodal social media. The hypothesis assumes that new genres of travelogue and book-trailer, which are typical of marketing communication (tourist and publishing discourses), may be of great usage in the practice of teaching foreign languages. The development of assignments for individual work comprises the breakthrough of the research with the view of describing the ways of employing social media in the lessons of the Russian language (speech, vocabulary, grammar). For this purpose, the author suggests, first and foremost, an instructive linguocultural project aimed at showing Russia to foreign students with the help of a travelogue as an educative instrument. It enables students to employ different speech genres, learn and activate vocabulary of various topics (transport, hotel accommodation, food, sightseeing, souvenirs, museums, etc.), grammar, and syntax.
The modern pedagogical practice has introduced the creation of book trailers as a new means of conscious reading and creative storytelling about individual impressions and experiences alongside making presentations. Book-trailer appears to be a poly code text with a harmonious composition of verbal and non-verbal components. The creation of a book trailer helps promotes several educative missions. It is possible to organize the individual and teamwork of students. The task may imply making a multimedia video clip to illustrate a piece of literature. For an individual form of work, a teacher elaborates a general structure of the script. It is recommended to follow the traditional variant: introduction (fortune cookie, topic, and subject), the second part to explain the subject; storyline, climax, and final. The next stage is to assess the book trailer after its demonstration in public. It is preferable to assign students to play the roles of experts. The book trailer is judged, first and foremost, by the quality of accomplished tasks. This assignment promotes the development of speech skills while expressing evaluation statements.
As a result, the research has proved that creating a travelogue may be an effective way of exploring a foreign culture as well as a useful instrument for teaching foreign languages, and creating a book trailer may develop skills of conscious reading and creativity for students.
Project activity in education enhances students’ competencies, promotes their teamwork and creativity, and teaches them to analyze verbal and non-verbal communication components, its syncretic character in expressing main ideas and providing cohesion and integrity of a poly code text. Thus, several educational, methodological, ideological, and culturological missions can be achieved.