ГУД БАЙ, RUSSKIY ALFAVIT? ПРОБЛЕМЫ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ КИРИЛЛИЦЫ НА УРОКАХ РКИ

Abstract

According to the standards of teaching RFL (Russian as a foreign language), students have to acquire the written language in the following way: cursive and printed letters should be mastered simultaneously. It is strongly recommended to start teaching the Cyrillic alphabet from the very first class. However, nowadays the situation is the following: very often students complete the studies of the Russian alphabet having mastered the printed letters only. It is at this stage of language acquisition that the majority of students experience certain serious problems, which result in the fact that the students stop learning the Russian language or their motivation to learn it decreases. More often, according to our research results, the learners are inclined to study the printed letters due to the shortage of a sufficient number of teaching hours and lack of practical necessity for them to learn to write in Russian. The teachers of Russian as a foreign language (RFL) have to adjust to the real situation and the audience: they have to avoid using the cursive letters. Sometimes RFL teachers have to exclude the use of the Cyrillic alphabet at all. Globalization, commercialism, the language policy have led to the activization of the tendency to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet and pass on to transliteration. At present there are many variants of transliteration. In the language classroom, maximum attention is paid to the teaching of listening and speaking skills at the expense of developing written skills. In our view, this causes the further levelling of the role of the Cyrillic alphabet in the Russian as a foreign language classroom, which results in setting new methodological tasks to RFL teachers. Undoubtedly, it is worth remembering that the Cyrillic alphabet is an invaluable national heritage of the Russian people, the stem of the Russian culture and a part of a cultural-educational space. Therefore, we consider any infringement on the Russian alphabet as unlawful and intolerable. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.7.2