Online Correspondence in Writing Courses as a Space for Conceptual Foundations of Linguistic Education

Abstract

The paper deals with the organization of linguistic education aimed at developing communicative and speech skills. The research concentrated on its textual component in foreign students as part of a writing course. The study was part of the project on linguistic and didactic potential of online correspondence, which highlighted a problem area in the speech behavior of foreign students who were in correspondence with Russian native speakers. The issue had to deal with the text organization of letters. The research team addressed the speech and thinking activity of the foreign students and, subsequently, turned to the cognitive tools for arranging the written and speech material, i.e., the frame. The frame analysis revealed a linguodidactic genre frame model with the stages of framing and reframing. During the framing stage, the students mastered the actual communicative-speech material to form the content of the subject-situational frame as an integral part of the genre frame. Further development was expansion-oriented. The framing made it possible to acquire textual norms, which led to the text frame, i.e., the second component of the genre frame. The reframing stage was aimed at developing the textual competence based on context complication and stylistic transformations of the original meanings. The article introduces various types of lexical, syntactical, and textual transformations, as well as stylistic transformations that allow non-native speakers to express the same meaning with stylistically diverse linguistic means.