Russian as a foreign language textbook: at the crossroads of ways, opinions and interests

Abstract

The paper discusses the issues of creating textbooks on Russian as a foreign language (RFL) for pre-university students. Nowadays a lot of Russian universities use study packs with course components developed by teams of teachers who work at these universities. The urgence of the study is stipulated by the necessity to analyze a rather chaotic process of creating and implementing varied course components at a specific university. The study is based on the analysis of RFL textbooks published by the Institute of International Education at Voronezh State University (hereinafter referred to as IIE VSU) from 2000 to 2017. The aim of the study is to substantiate the need for a multifaceted approach to creating textbooks and other course components. This aim suggests performing a number of specific tasks: analyzing course materials published by IIE VSU and defining a preferable structure of the study pack on Russian as a foreign language for pre-university students, determining the principles of dividing learning materials into units within the textbook and describing potential solutions in creating textbooks and online courses (which can accompany a textbook or used autonomously). As the result the study demonstrates the prospective structure of the RFL study packs of second generation and specific principles of data distribution in the main textbook and in accompanying course materials. The paper concludes with the idea of the necessity of combining traditional instructional principles (e. g., convergence and minimization) with relatively new principles, such as “the dialogue of cultures”, gradation of the data according to their informative value and frequency.