Abstract:

National research Tomsk polytechnic university traditionally attracts a considerable number of international students to study for academic degrees either in English or Russian as a medium of instruction. The choice of Russian programmes requires international students to obtain a comprehensive training of Russian as a foreign language and develop their communicative skills. The initial stage of developing communicative competence of future engineers in Russian is to build their phonological and orthographic competences in order to ensure successful interaction both oral and written in academic, professional and social contexts.

Teaching pronunciation and spelling is very often undermined in favour of grammar and vocabulary, but they form the basic confidence background for any further language use. Awareness of intonation patterns in a foreign language enables comprehending most intentions implied by native speakers and ensures better understanding and a more confident position of students, as they demonstrate less anxiety in their further study and communication.

The paper analyses some popular English and Russian approaches to building phonological competence at the initial stage of studying languages (the introductory phonetics course). The books are reviewed on the basis of the feasibility of their application according to the logics of the speech ontogeny in teaching foreign and second languages. Based on the review some approaches to develop distinct pronunciation and literate spelling for engineering students have been presented. The paper describes the experience of building Russian phonological competence of international students with the use of the approaches mentioned.

Keywords:

Russian as a medium of instruction, Russian as a foreign language, phonological and communicative competences, technical university, international students.