О КОНЦЕПЦИИ ДИСТАНЦИОННОГО КУРСА ПОВЫШЕНИЯ КВАЛИФИКАЦИИ «МЕТОДИКА ПРЕПОДАВАНИЯ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА КАК ИНОСТРАННОГО (РКИ): ТРАДИЦИИ И ИННОВАЦИИ»

Subject of study. The remote course "Methods of teaching Russian as a second language (RSL): traditions and innovations" is developed specially for teachers of Russian as a Second Language who want to improve their skills. The main goal of this course is to introduce teachers of Russian to traditional conceptions of RSL learning and the latest studies of problems at teaching RSL. Participants can immediately use the knowledge acquired from this course in their teaching practice. The years of experience of RSL teachers at St. Petersburg State University and who teach Russian to foreigners helped to identify the themes that on the one hand are basic, and on the other hand, they cause certain difficulties for RSL teachers.

Study materials. During the course, participants receive information about the following pedagogical functions of RSL teacher (according to V. Molchanovskiy) [1]:

1. Communication-teaching (the ability to achieve practical goals of training and knowledge about the communicative, speech and language content of the subject of study - "Russian as a second language").

2. Information-retranslating (the ability to perceive, select, transform, and transmit information intended for the student digestion).

3. Motivation-challenging (the ability to focus on the student as an active subject of the educational process and to select the situation determined curricular activities).

4. Instrument-adaptating (the ability to use the appropriate means for study).

5. Self-realization and self-development functions (the ability of self-understanding, the ability to understand the activities of the learning process, to manage and put in perspective the professional actions, the ability of professional self-education, self-learning and self-education).

The development of the teacher’s personality and his/her professional qualities are complicated by the limited timeframe under the conditions of remote education. This supposes the greater amount of individual work of students and the optimal organization of learning process which should help to build primary forms of RSL teacher competencies as much as possible. Taking this into account, the remote course provides the work with scientific texts relating to this section (mandatory and optional). After reading the text, students perform control tasks and exercises. This approach results in a true practical orientation of this course that necessitates the need for representation of the learning process as the activities related to the solution of professional and pedagogical objectives that serve as units of teaching. According to modern methodists, the task is the specific goal given under certain conditions, it can be achieved by conversion of these conditions according to the specific procedure [2].

The remote course puts the functional tasks (communicative activity learning, informative-retranslating tasks, the task of using and adapting training tools, motivational and challenging tasks, tasks of professional self-realization and teacher self-development) and didactic tasks (gnostic tasks, constructively-designing tasks, organizational tasks, the tasks of pedagogical communication).

The objectives of each section of this course reflect the above mentioned tasks. Participants must learn to solve the educational problems as a result of training, thus forming teacher’s personality; he/she must be not just a specialist with a set of activity-related skills. According to G.P. Shchedrovitsky: "Those things of individuals engaged in activities differ substantially from the activities themselves; those are the "internal" subjective conditions and means to enable them to build a variety of activities ... "[3]. The important thing is psychological and intellectual readiness to solve human problems. In this case, we can speak about the formation of professional and pedagogical framework, which is a body of knowledge:

a) knowledge of the subject itself (teaching content, i.e. the knowledge of what to teach);

b) knowledge of technics and technology of education (teaching methodology, i.e. the knowledge of how and by what means to teach, what tricks to use);

c) knowledge of the national, cultural and individual characteristics of the students;

d) knowledge of how to apply existing knowledge in specific situations, taking into account the specific conditions of learning.

These skills as a whole correspond to the concept of RSL teacher professional competence and provide the high efficiency of pedagogical process.

The remote course "Methods of Teaching Russian as a Second Language (RSL): tradition and innovation" provides the formation of the following types of RSL teacher competencies (according to V. Molchanovskiy) [4]:

1. All humanities competence. If the teacher has the sufficient level of professional skills at the all humanities competence the problems of intercultural communication can be effectively resolved.

2. Linguistic competence. As a leading subject competence, this type of competence is based on the formed linguistic consciousness of the teacher of Russian. The basis of the linguistic competence is systematically organized body of knowledge about the system of the Russian language.

3. Psychological competence. This includes the knowledge on psychology, educational activities (the unity of pedagogical and learning activities); psychology of educational activity and its subject - the student; psychology of teaching activity (unity of teaching and educating activities); psychology of pedagogical and learning co-operation and communication (I.A. Zimniaya).

4. Pedagogical competence. Pedagogical competence consists of four blocks of general pedagogical knowledge:

1) Knowledge of the basic ideas, concepts, rules, and laws governing the development of pedagogical phenomena;

2) Knowledge of the leading pedagogical theories, categories and concepts;

3) Fundamental teaching facts;

4) Application of knowledge about the general methods of teaching.

5. Methodical competence. This type of competence includes the knowledge of teaching theories, concepts and approaches of foreign languages studying; knowledge of methodological term system; knowledge of scientific and methodical literature for RSLs; knowledge of techniques, methods and ways of teaching; knowledge of the exercises typology aimed at the formation of relevant skills; knowledge of programs, textbooks, manuals and technical training.

6. Professional-communicative competence. This competence involves the ability of the teacher to set his/her mind on training and to set the students on communication; the ability to achieve and maintain the communication contact; the ability to set pedagogically reasonable relationships with colleagues and other members of the pedagogical process; the ability to perceive and evaluate changes in the conditions of communication timely and adequately; the ability to properly evaluate the communication behavior of students, their reactions on the verbal behavior of the teacher and other students; promptly adjust their own actions and those of communication students.

Additionally the professional and communicative competence includes: teaching tact; ability to improvise; the ability to harmonize the RSL training tasks with the forms and techniques of professional pedagogical communication; the ability to use communications to improve the teaching learning activities of students; the ability to create the conditions for a comfortable communicating and students in the classroom and in the real communication; the ability to maintain motivation for academic communication and study of the Russian language; the ability to methodically properly dose the own voice product on the lesson; ability to provide a successful solution to the planned communicative tasks.

The students of the remote course "Methods of Teaching Russian as a Second Language (RSL): traditions and innovations" must master the teaching technique, which includes:

1) a good elocution;

2) a good culture of speech (standardization, lamprophony, relevance, variability, expression);

3) the ability to use the facial expressions and gestures correctly;

4) the ability to regulate a mental state;

5) the ability to take into account national and cultural characteristics of the acquisition of knowledge by students of different national cultures.

It should be borne in mind that the RSL teacher should be dynamic, active and reflective person. In the case of activity-oriented learning, the pedagogical reflection on the part of the training involves not the direct leadership of the student's actions but the creation of subjective, personal reasons of training activities. The teaching reflection is shown during:

1) educational interaction of the teacher and the student, when the teacher tries to understand and purposefully adjust the formulation of thoughts, feelings and actions of students;

2) designing the activities of students when the teacher determines the learning objectives, and presents them in a constructive schemes to achieve;

3) self-reflection and self-learning activities.

Professional competence supposes that a teacher has such characteristics as an adequacy, which ensures successful implementation of educational activities. The adequacy is understood in methodical literature to be the flexibility, high adaptive capacity of teacher training in the specific circumstances.

Results. So here are the major issues which are included in the program of "Methods of Teaching Russian as a Second Language (RSL): traditions and innovations" remote course:

- Psycholinguistic problems of studying foreign language. This section discusses concepts such as interference and transference, mistakes in the foreign language speech, defines the role of contrastive analysis in teaching of a foreign language.

- Goals and objectives of teaching Russian as a second language at different stages. Competency building approach to RSL teaching. This section is devoted to analysis of teaching methods and studying methods; here the goals and objectives of education are defined; the classification of objectives of foreign language learning is proposed, the competencies and describes the structure of competencies are delineated as well.

- The structure of the learning content. The concept of the learning content is essential for RSL methodology of teaching. It is necessary to substantiate the definition of components of the learning content, to solve the problems of the learning content selection depending on the object of training/language acquisition.

- Problems of bilingualism and training of foreign language pronunciation. The different definitions of "bilingualism" term are examined; the criteria for bilingualism description are described and the language contact is characterized within the scope of this topic.

- Principles of selection and organization of lexical and grammatical material at different stages of teaching. When working on a grammar within the course of RSL it is offered to rely on the communicative syntax mechanism in receptive types of speech activity during the analysis of the communicants statements in order to identify its value in speaking or writing in choosing speaking/writing grammar design for his/her messages. The attention is drawn to the fact that vocabulary learning is carried out by the interaction of known operational levels of language: vocabulary, phonetics, word-formation, morphological and syntactic.

- Problems of teaching speech activities types (reading, speaking, listening, writing). The series of lectures covers quite a wide range of issues: the principles of texts selection for reading and listening, special aspects of writing control, assessment of the skills level in speaking at different levels of learning RSL.

Conclusions. The remote course "Methods of Teaching Russian as a Second Language (RSL): traditions and innovations" will allow the participants to increase their knowledge on the methods, techniques and skills on teaching, to learn more about the latest research methodological problems in RSL teaching in order to apply them effectively in teaching Russian to foreigners language.