ANALYTICAL READING AS A MEANS TO FORM SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCES

Abstract

The article tries to revisit the educational approaches to literary text. Not denying the literature the functions of forming a personality, the author raises the question of its implementation in education, in particular, in teaching foreign languages, more precisely, Russian as Foreign Language. In the 21 st century, the approach to education is determined by how successfully it forms competences that are in demand in real life for many years to come. According to the author, to fulfill the competence-based tasks of teaching foreign languages one should somewhat shift the emphasis from the linguacultural competence to the sociocultural competence, especially given the fact that they complement each other in influencing the cognitive advancement of the learner. In the article, the author is consistently advocating for the relevance of the sociocultural competence in mobilizing the wide education potential to develop skills of learning nonprimary languages, on the one hand, and the relevance of analytical reading in it, on the other. One could say that even a few years before the educational standards were adopted in the Republic of Armenia (before 2016), the Ayb School, through its motto “Understand and Do,” not only adopted the competence-based education, but also envisioned the vector of forming and developing sociocultural competence. As regards the course of Russian as Foreign Language, the groups with the Ayb “standards,” as the article intends to show, design it as part of analytical reading, starting from 7 th grade, i.e. from the advanced basic level (A2+ according to CEFR). Later in the article, the author outlines the contours of the teaching tactics to develop skills of analytical reading leading to coherent speech both oral and written (speaking and writing). The article ends with excerpts from the students’ works that demonstrate “flashes” of the sociocultural competence, and the conclusion that organized, evaluated, supported, and mentally transformed reading forms the sociocultural competence and it is its modest, but weighty contribution to forming real lifelong experience of the students.