Topical socio-political texts in Russian as a source of educational materials for foreign students of humanities (basic and additional educational programs)

The paper discusses the issues of training foreign students of humanities in reading and listening to journalistic texts in Russian. The aim of the study is to identify ways to update the materials of available textbooks on Russian as a foreign language, taking into account various factors. These include methodological factors (purpose and content of training; level of proficiency in Russian; requirements of normative documents; organizational forms of training; students’ training program; national composition of the study group), linguistic factors (genre, style, content value of the text; characteristics of text materials from the standpoint of textuality categories and communicative categories), extralinguistic factors (socio-political situation in the world; ideological attitudes). Special attention is paid to the description of the bank of standard texts of the main thematic groups. The work proposes tasks to control the level of formation of language and speech competencies within the framework of the academic discipline “Russian language in professional international activity” (level B2) at different stages of training. The scientific novelty of the study lies in developing criteria for the selection of journalistic texts for Russian language classes for foreigners studying in various educational programs (basic or additional). As a result of the research, the features of the use of media texts in the process of teaching students of a faculty of international relations are highlighted in comparison with the ways of presenting these texts within the framework of the course for students of international academic exchange programs.