“ENTERTAINING” THEORY OF RELATIVITY IN THE LESSONS OF RFL: VIEWING THE FEATURE FILM “INTERSTELLAR”

Nowadays the number of foreign students entering various educational programs at Russian universities is actively growing. Multimedia technologies are actively used for their training along with traditional forms of work. This paper discusses the features of working with video material in physics lessons in a foreign language classroom. Such classes help to increase the motivation of students to acquire knowledge and successfully master the main course material. The authors focus their attention on a visual demonstration of the basic provisions of the general theory of relativity, for which the Oscar-winning film “Interstellar” by Christopher Nolan is chosen. The paper describes the main stages of the lesson such as preparatory, viewing and final, as well as their main aims. The authors offer different types of tasks and exercises that prepare students for watching a scientific and feature film on the topic under study, control their understanding and learning of theoretical information. The paper provides examples of the implementation of all types of speech activity while working on the selected topic. The authors demonstrate that this form of the lesson allows one to form not only communicative competence, such as the ability to answer questions and present the studied material, but also professional competence, such as the ability to solve tasks, formulate hypotheses, and scientifically argue one’s point of view. The proposed system of organizing the lesson proves the importance and efficiency of including video material in the process of studying physics. It is necessary to emphasize the practicality of the work that offers a well-planned lesson, which can be adapted to the level of a student (either a student of the pre-academic programs, bachelor’s or master’s). In addition, the presented types of tasks can form the basis for creating a similar lesson on any other topic.