Abstract:

The modern information society puts forward new requirements for optimization of higher education: the culture of consuming ready-made knowledge is replaced by a culture of active search, analysis and evaluation of information. Development of critical thinking among young people will ensure the success of this course of changes in higher education. Future specialists have a need for independent study of the subject, and a foreign language is not the purpose of learning, but a way to obtain and reproduce knowledge about the surrounding reality.

The approach to teaching a foreign language is also urgently changing to meet both the need to process a large flow of foreign language information, and the necessity to see inconsistencies and contradictions, cut off inaccurate data and separate facts from their interpretation. All these tasks can be solved through working with media texts in foreign language classes at university. Today’s reality is constructed by media and almost everything a person knows about the word is received from media texts.

A media text is most generally defined as a message presented in any form and genre of media (Internet article, TV show, video clip, etc.). The article contains a classification of media texts and criteria for identifying text types according to traditional communication models.

The elaborated technology for developing critical thinking based on working with foreign media texts allowed us to focus on specific cognitive processes dominating at every stage of thinking: associative perception, synthesis, analysis and evaluation of media texts, combined with audiovisual imagination, logical and intuitive forecasting. The technology describes methods of working with media texts in the course of teaching a foreign language in terms of their effectiveness for the development of both linguistic knowledge and skills, and critical thinking. The proposed methods include the analysis of media texts at the levels of: language content, characters, plot, cultural stereotypes, ideology, aesthetics, vital experience (correlation with the reader's biography and personal experience). The essence of each of these methods is revealed, practical examples of their application are given.

Keywords:

Pedagogical technology, critical thinking, media text, teaching a foreign language, technology for developing critical thinking.