Abstract:

The category of space is one of the main categories of human existence. Even ancient philosophers tried to understand the phenomenon of space surrounding a person, to determine its characteristic features and the consequences of its changes. The concept of space is an important part of both the scientific and naive pictures of the world, and each language reflects these ideas in its own way.

The authors of this article consider that the problem of spatial relations is of interest to teachers of Russian as a foreign language. When teaching Russian to foreign students, this topic causes both special interest and special difficulties, mainly when studying verbs denoting the position of objects in space.

Along with the traditional means of presenting educational material, in the authors’ opinion, visualization tools have certain impact. The interest in visualization is explained by the entire course of development of human activity, by the increase of information stream, for the assimilation of which traditional methods and tools become unsuitable. For further accumulation, processing and transmission of information in all spheres of human activity, new, compact, mobile means of reflecting the objective world in the consciousness of the subject are needed. Visualization is one of these tools.

Psychologists confirm that visual images contribute to a more effective comprehension of information. This is especially important when working with Chinese students. The ideographic nature of the Chinese language allows Chinese people to perceive visual images better than text. The use of visualization in the learning process makes it more accessible and contributes to a more solid assimilation of new knowledge.

The authors suggest that the effectiveness of teaching Russian to foreign students will significantly increase if information and educational technologies based on visualization and combining elements of traditional and electronic presentation of the material, are included in the learning process. In order to confirm this assumption, an experiment was conducted, which is described in the presented article.

The results of the experiment showed that the use of visualization in learning Russian as a foreign language allows to provide an intensification of the learning process; to activate educational and cognitive activities; to form critical and visual thinking, to mobilize the mental activity of students, to increase interest in learning Russian and the ability of involuntary memorization, to expand the volume of assimilated material.

Keywords:

Verbs of position in space, visualization tools, Russian as a foreign language.