AUTHENTIC AND NON-AUTHENTIC TUTORIALS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING: THE CASE OF RUSSIAN UNIVERSITY

Authentic tutorials on the study of foreign languages do not always fully correspond to the goals and conditions of the learning process. It happens because adult students are not able to internalize intuitively any speech complexes without explaining cause-effect relationships in grammar and syntax. Besides, the structural, systemic and cognitive differences between synthetic and analytical languages are not clarified in original didactic materials and stay out of the methodical focus. Domestic tutorials, from our point of view, more optimally and ergonomically follow the goal of forming linguistic competences and multi- competence, implying a contrasting comparison of linguistic systems over a whole set of parameters.

To compare the potential of authentic tutorial and tutorials created not by native speakers, we conducted a pedagogical experiment. Its participants (103 students) were divided into groups dealing with an authentic tutorials and groups engaged in a tutorial created by foreign languages teachers of Russian origin. The lexical and grammatical themes in both tutorials were identical. The difference between them consisted in the inclusion in the didactic material of a non-authentic textbook of grammatical comments in Russian, the translation of the lexicon into Russian with an indication of word’ polysemy and the availability of exercises for translation from Russian into the studied language and vice versa.

Before the beginning and at the end of the experiment, we held tests and interviews aimed at identifying the current level of learners’ competences in a foreign language acquisition. The obtained results allowed to state that the ability to construct a spontaneous speech utterance turned out to be higher in groups engaged in a tutorial created not by a native speaker. Groups engaged in an authentic tutorial demonstrated a great propensity to reproduce stable phrases and fixed word combinations learned during the work on the text. All participants of the study performed the grammatical tasks with approximately the same level of progress. In the comments on the perception of the experimental conditions, the first group noted the lack of the opportunity to receive an explanation about the correlation between certain grammatical phenomena with the realities of the native language. They complained about the absence of revealing the peculiarities in lexical compatibility and semantic hues, in comparison with similar lexical units in their native language. The second group indicated that the opportunity to implement the direct and reverse translation of sentences enabled them to understand better the essence of the lexical and grammatical phenomena, to achieve greater fluency and self-confidence in the production of proper speech utterances; feel themselves surer in the process of independent work on educational materials outside the classroom.

Hence, it seems rather productive to create a supplementary book composed by a non-native speakers to an authentic tutorial, as it allows to optimize the learning of a foreign language ad hoc. Such a combination of didactic materials makes it possible to achieve the most effective educational results.