Abstract:

All spheres of life today require a multi-skilled specialist capable of professional mobility, research, impartial perception of someone else's opinion, intercultural communication and cooperation, compromise and tolerance. With this background, the issue of developing the skills of critical reading among students of higher educational institutions is especially relevant.

Contemporary society needs a critically thinking person, namely the one who is able not only to see the message left by the speaker or the author of the publication, but also to consider the problem from different points of view, hear different opinions and find a compromise solution. A critically thinking person is tolerant to different points of view, is able to disregard the negative background of communication and consider several possible solutions to the problem.

Who is responsible for the development of this skill at the university but the teacher? It is he who creates certain educational environment, builds up good relationship between all concerned, contributes to the harmonious development of the student's personality through the culture of another country and another language.

The paper aims at considering the ways of developing critical reading skills through reading foreign periodicals. The authors offer a set of teaching techniques for critical reading skill formation. The key point here is that the work with the text presupposes several successive steps.

The consequence of using these teaching techniques will be the students’ ability to formulate goals and objectives, to set hypotheses, to assess their own and others' judgments and put forward a compromise solution. In the future, reading any publication, they will be able to assess the opinion of the author, to see the degree of the author’s influence on the reader’s views, but, simultaneously, adequately receive the information transferred by the text itself.

Therefore, the skill of critical reading opens up new opportunities for effective participation in foreign language communication, thanks to which mutual understanding between different nationalities becomes a reality.

Keywords:

Critical reading, critical thinking, journalistic text, foreign language, cluster, effective reading, reflection, tolerance, cross-cultural communication.