Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to prove the feasibility of using such a speech genre as "demotivator" in the process of teaching students a foreign language (on the example of Russian as a foreign language). From a practical point of view the aim is to provide a system of exercises for working with demotivators, differentiated by levels of language proficiency.

The article contains the main results of a linguistic experimental study of 400 units of speech genre, conducted within the cognitive-linguistic direction approach to the theory of speech genres (methods of discursive, communicative-pragmatic analysis and modeling) to identify the main components and the variations of the main genre model. As a result of the research, the main components of the genre (the type of concept, modal subject, referential connection with reality and the main speech strategies), the basic (simple) model, the principles of logical and cultural complexity of a content were identified.

Conducted in 2019-2020, a two-part observational methodological experiment in four groups of students allowed:
a) to determine the effectiveness of using demotivators of different types in groups of students of different levels of foreign language proficiency;
b) to clarify the feasibility of using "demotivator" as a stimulus in productive and receptive types of speech activity.

During the main experiment, a learning model was built and tested. It contains the most successful exercises aimed at developing the necessary skills (monologue speech, discussion of information, creating an essay based on a demotivator stimulus, and, finally, the skills of creating demotivators to make the desired impact on the audience).

Describing the system as a whole, it could be summarized as follows. At the A1-B1 level, the leading skills are cohesion and coherence of speech, students need to learn how to work with explicit factual information, so the main cognitive types of exercises are semantical (describing) and searching (deductive). At the B1-B2 level, the main purpose is to expand socio-cultural competence (reconstructive exercises and tasks on the interpretation of the facts). For the C1 level, the main task is the formation of discursive competence, so more attention is paid to the independent work of students aimed at ensuring that in the future they can independently improve their skills (presentational and constructive-interpretative exercises). The results of the analysis of the effectiveness of the learning are also interesting, for they show the degree of expediency of using demotivators at different levels in different types of speech activity.

Keywords:

Teaching methods, Russian as a foreign language, demotivator, speech genre.