Abstract:

The revision of the content of the educational process has led to understanding of an increasing role of the text in the process of teaching foreign languages in higher education institutions. European standards for the study of foreign languages, revised in 2015-2018, introduced the idea of linguistic mediation as one of the many guidelines, thus, having put the problem of understanding and interpretation of the text to the fore. The growing trend towards digitalization of learning processes, as well as the constant increase in the volume of textual information in everyday communication and on the Internet have also contributed to the topicality of the issue.

In a broad sense, a text is a coherent sign system that needs decoding with the application of several linguistic and cultural codes. Modern strategies of text description are largely determined by the anthropocentricity of science. The text as a reflection of human activity is the object of many interdisciplinary studies and is closely connected with nonverbal content, for instance, with cultural objects. As an object of interdisciplinary research, the text can be considered from different perspectives, including the framework of teaching the interpretation of the text.

Today, in the post-structuralist era, the idea of studying the text has penetrated into the process of teaching foreign languages, since the text as a targeted social action of an addressee reveals a communicative intention with account of the communicative situation, the pattern of speech behavior and interaction with the particular recipient. In this case, during the learning process, the student deals with the functional stratification of the language and the peculiarities of its use in various communicative spheres, which leads to a natural appeal to fiction and scientific prose, newspaper texts, journalistic speeches, texts of official documents, etc.

In this respect, the problem of understanding and interpretation of a text is one of the most relevant ones in the learning process, and today the ways to solve it are still being outlined. In this study, the problem of the status of a text in teaching foreign languages is considered, approaches to its study are analyzed, and it is made an attempt to distinguish the concepts of text analysis and text interpretation in the process of foreign language teaching. The methods applied are observation and comparison methods, quantitative and qualitative analysis of the existing teaching methods and strategies in higher education. In the course of the study, an approach that combines the linguistic analysis of the text and the interpretation based on the students’ understanding of the text as a semantic and communicative whole was proposed.

Keywords:

Text analysis, text interpretation, foreign language teaching, higher education.