Abstract:

Present-day teaching RFL (Russian as a foreign language) aims at both imparting a certain scope of knowledge and developing learners' personal qualities which are necessary for participation in a socially valuable activity (Slastenin, Kashirin).

In the course of communicative competence formation it is reasonable to place emphasis on developing learners' knowledge and skills of special-purpose speech production which ensure effective interaction in the framework of a specific professional activity.

Consequently, there is a great need for a specially elaborated system of exercises and tasks focused on a successful social self-realization of a language and speech personality.

During the process of developing a language personality the use of rhetorical methods and techniques as an effective means of optimizing verbal communication is of great importance.

The application of modern rhetorical methods and techniques is ethnoculturally specific: rhetorical criticism in England; theory of text composition influencing the recipient in Germany; logic of propositions about values, logic of humanities in France; rhetoric as a theory of verbal communication in the USA; Russian philological tradition, based on the rhetorical ideal of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

The article considers the definitions and classification of rhetorical methods and techniques in teaching Russian as a foreign language. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of teaching RFL with account to its linguistic and extralinguistic content. The practical section of the article contains a variety of reading comprehension tasks for the texts of different types and genres including the region-specific information (concerning national and cultural specifics of South Ural). The proposed tasks and exercises, providing verbal mastery in the process of teaching RFL, are aimed at the optimization of verbal communication.

Keywords:

Verbal competence, rhetorical methods and techniques, teaching Russian as a foreign language, effective communication.