Abstract:

Optimization of the learning process is very important in teaching Russian as a foreign language. It is important to arouse interest in a foreign language, to develop student’s language and speech competence through the study of literary text.
Foreign students often face problems of various kinds. They have to master a huge additional information array (new morphological and syntactic rules, lexical, phraseological units), and the difficulties in the grammatical system of the Russian language.
Learning a foreign language can not be complete without reference to the culture of the country of the studied language. The expansion of linguistic and cultural knowledge in the course "Reading" is possible due to a specially selected material, contributing to the formation of socio-cultural competences of the student, which is an important component of communicative competences – the goal of learning any language as a foreign.
The subject of this article is the problem of the selection of literary texts as the material for reading in the formation of socio-cultural competences of foreign students who speak Russian at the level of B1-B2.
The aim of the course is to master the basic skills of semantic and linguistic analysis of literary texts. The studied material, in our opinion, should contain a sufficiently high percentage of conversational structures, colloquial vocabulary for the most easy and quick inclusion of the student into the language environment.
The following methods were used in the research: analysis of methodical literature and analysis of dissertation researches on the topic; monitoring the process of developing foreign students’ skills in reading classical Russian literature texts.
The question that is very important here is who should be the authors of the texts studied in a foreign audience?
It is noteworthy that many foreign students have some knowledge of the Russian classical literature. Very often these students are interested in reading and understanding the literature of the modern period. Students often prefer to read the works of modern Russian authors.
At the Kazan Federal University, the development of skills in reading is carried out using the texts of modern Russian authors.
Conclusions are given about texts that can be chosen for a foreign audience, and about texts which are of interest for study in this audience. The article provides examples from the teaching experience: how texts reflecting the Russian reality, socio-cultural values of post-Soviet culture, texts written by Tatiana Tolstoy, Victoria Tokareva are perceived, and what is the perception of Russian classics in a foreign audience.

Keywords:

Language and speech competence, literary text, the correct choice of the studied texts, semantic and linguistic analysis of literary text.