Teaching professionally oriented art history discourse in classes of Russian as a foreign language

At the current level of development of the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language for special purposes, insufficient attention is paid to the professionally oriented teaching, which allows modeling imaginary professional situations of communication and forming the skills necessary for real professional communication. The problem is especially noticeable in teaching creative disciplines (including art criticism) where thematic discourse plays an important role. The paper describes an experiment of teaching art history discourse to Uzbek students in the Russian language classes. A model for studying art history discourse was experimentally introduced into practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language at the level of professional communication. The purpose of the study was to develop a technology for teaching art history discourse based on professionally oriented authentic texts in classes of Russian as a foreign language for future specialists in art. The experiment was described in detail with the allocation of experimental and control groups. The experimental group studied the language for professional purposes with the use of the teaching materials developed by the university professors. Most of the tasks of the training package are based on the information from the website of the Belgorod State Art Museum, which updates the educational material and implements the principle of professional orientation of education. The control group followed the traditional program of Russian as a foreign language for future artists. Upon completion of the experimental training, both groups had to do a creative task. Further assessment of the task demonstrated the effectiveness of the use of authentic art history texts and creative tasks in teaching the Russian language for professional purposes to Uzbek students. The study revealed that the students of the experimental group made greater progress compared to the control group in developing such a professional skill as “following art history strategies when creating a text”.