Authentic video materials as a means of shaping communicative competence in Russian among Spanish and Dutch learners

Abstract

Teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) without immersion into a natural language environment presents a particular challenge and requires modern methods to deve-lop basic communicative and linguistic competencies of the students. While teaching listening at the first stage of learning a foreign language, an active use of authentic materials plays an important role as one of the major requirements of the communicative approach. The relevance of the present topic consists in the need of developing listening skills at the early stage of studying RFL and optimizing the work of students as independent learners. The aim of the study was to develop a set of video exercises for A0 level, aimed at improving the communicative competence of students, their knowledge of cultural norms and speech etiquette. To achieve this aim,a set of methodological methods has been used: a task modeling method, a comparative method and observation. The complete set of exercises was tested in groups of students aged 20-45, learning Russian as a foreign language at beginner’s level at two language centers, in Spain and in the Netherlands. Exercises with video fragments were divided into six units and were designed to practice the use of some grammar forms and lexical units (verbs belonging to the first and second conjugation type, prepositions в/на (in, on), accusative and prepositional cases).For independent work, students were asked to complete the preparatory and main stages of each unit. The final stage, as a control stage, was carried out in the classroom with a teacher to activate the structures heard in listening, analyze and discuss the video material. The results ofthe study show that the use of authentic materials improves listening, brings the educational process as close as possible to the situation of real live communication, motivates students and helps them to master the new grammatical and lexical units. There were no significant differences observed in the results of the final task on listening in Spanish and Dutch groups. The errors have to do with an increased speed of utterance, voice overlapping, children's speech, that will be taken into account for the further development of listening exercises for A0 level students and publishing a full set of exercises for RFL learners and teachers.