Abstract:

An extremely important task of teaching foreign students in universities of the Russian Federation is mastering the scientific style of speech (SSS). For technical and natural profiles, the language is a step towards mastering special disciplines for students’ further professional life, therefore the SSS goes through the entire course of Russian, accompanying a foreigner throughout the entire period of their study.

The purpose of our research was to reveal the sources and results of the mental "restructuring" of the teaching and learning system of SSS in universities of different profiles. For this, authors had investigated the history of the scientific style as an independent variety of the national language, studied and compared the curricula of universities of different profiles, developed and conducted a pedagogical experiment to analyze the qualitative changes in students' knowledge at different stages of learning.

The research was carried out based on the programs of a technical stream (Engineering Academy of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia) and natural sciences stream (Medical Faculty of the Saratov State Medical University). The control group consisted of foreign students of the Nizhniy Novgorod Academy of the MIA of Russia. The number of informants was 60 (20 from each university). To verify the formulated hypothesis about a qualitative change in attitudes towards the study of SSS, a 10-item questionnaire was developed. This questionnaire was proposed to students of 1-2 and 3-4 years of study. The results were systematized using the Statistics 6.0 program and were summarized in tables and diagrams.

An analysis of the work programs of the three universities showed a general trend of gradual separation of educational material on the scientific style and vocabulary of terms from the integrative course of Russian as a foreign language. This separation starts from the A2 + level at the preparatory department and continues with the appearance of disciplines entirely devoted to SSS in 3-4 years of study (level B1-C1). A special group is represented by postgraduate education programs (postgraduate studies) based on the material of the SSS and professional communication.

The survey results showed differences in the initial level of the scientific thinking formation: high - 21%, medium - 46%, low - 33% in 1-2 years of study, and 34%, 53%, and 13% in 3-4 years of study, respectively. At the same time, a high level of motivation to study Russian scientific terminology was noted among 89% of the surveyed junior students and 100% of the older ones. The problematic thematic and cognitive areas, the work with which must be strengthened, are noted: typified derivation schemes in the terminology system, the frame structure of the phrase in the SSS, compression, and decompression of a scientific text.

The authors propose a specific pedagogical methodology, educational materials, and methods, which allow the gradual expansion of the cognitive capabilities of students through the introduction of structured knowledge and practical skills in working with SSS texts in Russian.

Keywords:

Scientific style of speech, Russian as a foreign language, teaching, evaluation, motivation.