EXTENSIVE AND INTENSIVE READING: GOALS OF TEACHING, DIFFICULTIES OF STUDYING, PERSPECTIVES OF DEVELOPING

Abstract

This article is devoted to reading, one of the most common types of speech activity in a non-linguistic university. The subject of the research is two types of academic reading i.e. intensive and extensive that are widely used in the process of teaching a foreign language. Each of the presented types of reading has its own inherent features and benefits. Extensive reading is able to create a kind of language environment for students in which they plunge in the process of working at the text, experiencing intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from the full-scale comprehension of what they read. Intensive reading, in contrast to extensive reading, is aimed at understanding the lexical, grammatical and contextual meanings to comprehend the plot details and implicit meanings. In conclusion, the author puts forward a hypothesis according to which extensive and intensive types of reading contribute to faster and more successful (than all other types of speech activity) acquisition of a foreign language despite the limited number of class hours devoted to its study in a non-linguistic university. However, it is necessary to think of methodology applied and to pay attention to the thorough selection of texts (for teaching these types of reading), the criterion of which is their entertaining plot and correspondence to the intellectual and linguistic level of students.