Texts About the Scientist: The Content of the Commentary in the Aspect of Russian as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The effectiveness of foreign languages teaching (and Russian as a foreign language) is determined, in particular, by the quality of the commentary accompanying the texts used in the educational process. In teaching foreign languages lexical and grammatical commentary is usually used to remove language difficulties, as well as cultural comments on some words and expressions explain to foreign students the specific phenomena of Russian culture. However, difficulties in understanding the text when studying Russian as a foreign language indicate the need to expand both the objects of comment and the content of the comment itself. The solution of this applied problem directly depends on linguistic knowledge that reveals the categories and units of the text, the peculiarities of its semantic composition, the specific speech organization caused by a particular type of text. Texts about scientists are relevant in teaching a foreign language. They showed the relevance of three varieties: 1) texts implementing the semantic model “A person and his actions” (tell about the activities of a scientist); 2) texts implementing the model “A Person and his qualitative characteristics” (express an assessment of the personality of a scientist, convey an opinion about a scientist); 3) texts combining the first two types. This third type usually placed in a more general, abstract context of reasoning (related to a particular problem of scientific activity of a scientist). Commentary as a possible tool for interpreting texts of these types indicates the necessary objects of training commenting, revealing their content in accordance with the text-characteristics of a particular type of text. Comments allow you to introduce lexical and syntactic material that ensures the implementation of author’s intentions, to reveal the information structure of the text, implications, logical and semantic connections of the components of the text structure. As a material for analysis and its interpretation are used: 1) educational text Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev, 2) text fragments from the book by M. Buras Linguists who came from the cold (2022), 3) essay by E. Vodolazkin The Truth about Schliemann (2015). Refs 13.