Galina Starikova, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Philology, has published a manual on the development of speech for international students: “Let's Talk about Russian Painting: Russian Art in the Lessons of Russian as a Foreign Language”. Pictures of Russian painters and artistic texts served as material for this book. In December, the textbook was presented in Vietnam at the Russian Language Forum, which was organized by the University. In the second semester, a group of students from the Shenyang Polytechnic University will study it.
- This book is the result of a four-year scientific seminar with
students - says Galina Starikova. - The idea came when I bought a book
about painting, addressed to children, where they understood the
language of genres, pictures, and artists. It seemed to me that this was
good material for international students to practice oral and written
speech. I began to use it in teaching Russian as a foreign language, and
in September 2014, I offered this topic to the participants of my
special seminar.
To create a textbook, Galina Starikova and her students studied the
experience of using painting in Russian schools, developed plans for
classes with different pictures, selected illustrative material, and
created a bank of possible assignments. The manual presents landscapes,
still-lifes, portraits from famous Russian artists Isaak Levitan, Ilya
Repin, Vasily Surikov, and others. The paintings are supplemented with
poems, riddles, proverbs, and sayings.
Assignments in the manual have a variety of plans: oral and written,
lexical, grammatical and historical, and cultural. For example, students
are invited to describe the location of objects in the still-life, and
tell what colors prevail in the picture and what impression it produces.
The manual is designed for international students with intermediate and
advanced levels of education. The goal of the textbook is not only to
develop vocabulary and speech analysis skills, but also to increase
students' interest in Russian culture and in Russia as a whole.
- In textbooks for international students, Russia, its history, and culture, is traditionally presented through geography, dates, and cultural stereotypes (the Kremlin, matryoshka doll, Maslenitsa, and others), and in our book it became possible to represent the country of the language studied through works of art, - said Galina Starikova.