Testing Problems in Russian as a Foreign Language in a Technical University

Abstract

Problems of theory and practice of the Russian as a foreign language testing for entrants in technical universities are considered. The benefits of test forms for controlling the foreign students’ skills in the Russian language during a hard time limit are presented. The structure and content of the tests, all types of tasks offered on the entrance and final examinations in the Russian language, the requirements to the skills and abilities of students in the types of speech activity - listening, speaking, reading and writing - on the basis of common-literary and scientific styles of speech are described in details. The conducted researches take into account the fact that numerous scientific and methodological researches are devoted to the problems of the foreign citizens testing, classification and selection of texts. The results of text analysis of the Russian textbooks required for testing, two types of tests in Russian as a foreign language for technical direction of training students, future bachelors and masters, are presented. It was found that for control of skills, knowledge, and skills in scientific style of speech should offer on basic science texts, fragments of authentic texts containing grammatical frequency constructions, typical for fundamental science texts in. After analyzing the types of educational texts in relation to the training of future graduate students the authors came to the conclusion that the most frequency texts are the ones of proofs and ones of discourse that were proposed to students when they were having exams in reading and listening. All the tasks were being tested for several years, which ultimately optimized the learning process significantly.