Abstract:

The formation of communicative competence in foreign language teaching involves the development of speech decoding skills and adequate responses to it at all language levels, including the communicative-pragmatic one. The comprehensive approach to the formation of communicative competence in teaching Russian as a foreign language is reflected in the State Standards of the Russian Federation. The basic material for the formation of communicative competence is lexical minima, in which according to the Russian state system for testing the criteria for word selection include stylistic unmarking (neutrality), syntagmatic and word-formation potential, and frequency.

Mastering the lexical minimum contributes to the successful delivery of testing; however, it does not guarantee adequate decoding of authentic Russian speech and successful performance of an illocutionary act. This can be ascribed to the fact that modern Russian colloquial speech is characterized by the frequency of stylistically marked vocabulary, including the ones formed with the help of suffixes that create an emotionally expressive and/or functionally stylistic coloring. It is no coincidence that the principle of pragma-stylistic marking is one of the defining criteria for the formation of a vocabulary and units description in the Prospectus of the Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Colloquial Speech (L.P. Krysin, 2010).

The present paper sets out to explicate the difficulties in the formation of communicative competence regarding teaching Russian as a foreign language at different levels (A2 to B2) and suggests possible ways to overcome them. The data of the study were collected by means of observations in the process of teaching Russian as a foreign language, analysis of derivatives and their frequency based on the national corpus of the Russian language and a survey of 50 foreign students. To put it differently, qualitative and quantitative methods are the basis of the study, using an inductive approach, quantitative data analysis, survey data analysis and morphemic and pragma-stylistic analysis.

The findings of our study confirm that recognizing the morphemes – roots and word-formation affixes, hindering the understanding of lexemes besides defining the stylistic and pragmatic characteristics of derivatives are the main problems for the learners of Russian as a foreign language. For this purpose, derivatives formed from units of lexical minima have been combined into a lexical subcorpus and then exercises, contributing to the development of word-formation competence and the skills of decoding the morphemic structures of colloquial Russian words have been developed.

The findings and suggestions of the present paper may have practical importance and significant implications in the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language in order to successfully form communicative competence and exclude communicative failures in Russian colloquial speech.

Keywords:

Russian as a foreign language, communicative competence, authentic colloquial speech, pragma-stylistic marking, derivatives.