Methodological seminar on Russian as a foreign language: what is important for a teacher to know
On December 7, 2021, IITU language experts held a training seminar “Russian as a foreign language. Methods of Russian as a Foreign Language” for schoolteachers participating in the pilot project of the Akelius Foundation and UNICEF, which is aimed at enhancing grammatical and digital skills of children who arrived in Kazakhstan from abroad.
During the interactive lecture, Associate Professor Dinara Aliyeva spoke about two methods of Russian as a foreign language - translational (through rules to speech) and direct (through speech to understanding the rules). According to her, while teaching, one should not give preference to only one method, they must be combined for effective learning. At the same time, the teacher must first teach the child to understand speech, distinguish words in the sound stream, and only then teach the rules.
Dinara Assylkhanovna addressed the teachers during the seminar “The most difficult thing is to help the child overcome the barrier and start speaking. We work with adults who purposefully came to learn the language. Your work is more difficult: small children are a different age group. With the help of our advice, it will be easier for you to recognize the symbols and work with the Akelius platform, the principle of which is based on the RFL methodology”.
Assistant Professor Oksana Bublikova, in turn, analyzed the materials on phonetics and pronunciation provided on the Akelius platform. She told what to do if the child does not pronounce the sounds. Oksana Vasiliyevna explained the phonetic games "Smart Ball", "Artist", "Me too!", "Reply" and others.
“We offer a number of phonetic games and tasks for the formation and capture of sounds, since at the initial stage it is worth setting the goal to teach children the phonetic features of speech that are important for RL: hard and soft, voiced and deaf consonants, vowels of different reduction, movable stress, expressing emotions with the help of intonations,” notes Oksana Vasiliyevna.
For practicing the correct pronunciation, verses that contain frequently used speech patterns and lexical units are of great value. Oksana Vasiliyevna in her speech spoke about the stages of work with poems in the classroom.
“Selection is carried out considering the characteristics of the students. When working on poetry, it is important to teach students to select individual speech patterns and words from the text and use them in their statements. Poems should be small in volume, simple and interesting,” explained Oksana Vasiliyevna.
As a reflection, IITU experts conducted an online questionnaire. The data obtained will allow us to prepare material for the next methodological seminar.