EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COGNITIVE-STYLE METHODS OF TEACHING RUSSIAN TO FOREIGN ECONOMICS STUDENTS

Abstract

One of the important issues of teaching Russian to foreign students studying at universities of the Russian Federation is the formation of professional and communicative competence. Mastering the language being studied in a professional context, as a rule, focuses on mastering the terminological vocabulary of specialized disciplines. However, as practice shows, the cognitive styles of students are not sufficiently taken into account in the in the classes of Language for Specific Purposes. The article concerns the problem of developing professionally oriented teaching Russian as a foreign language, which involves taking into account the cognitive styles of economics students. The choice of a cognitive-style learning model for pedagogical research, the target audience and the organization of the educational process is substantiated. The paper reveals options for solving these issues and the authors’ position. The work gives details to the structure of the methodological experiment, which was conducted with foreign economics students (20 academic hours) and its results. Levels of proficiency in the language of the specialty among students of the control and experimental groups, identified in the input testing, are compared. A statistical analysis of the experimental data is presented. The authors propose taking into account the established style profile of the experimental group, specific methodological techniques. The authors conclude that the cognitive-style methodology is effective and its application is promising in professionally oriented teaching of Russian as a foreign language.