The use of writer’s biography texts in lessons on Russian as a foreign language

The article is devoted to the study of the didactic value of biographical texts, writer’s biographies in particular, in the process of teaching Russian as a foreign language. The relevance of the issue is determined by the view of biography as an educational text with a certain structure, rich in regional and linguistic material necessary for the formation of the communicative competence of non-native speakers. At the same time, understanding such texts is often difficult for students due to the abundance of numerals (dates), proper names, and a variety of factual data. During the analysis of modern scientific works, the current forms and methods of studying biographical texts in lessons with foreign students were identified, on the basis of which the rules for composing such texts for their further use in the educational process were formulated. According to the outlined rules, an original text was compiled – a biography of the 19th-century writer V.A. Sollogub, as well as a set of tasks for the development of regional and cultural competencies and the improvement of speech activity. The assignments are presented in the traditional sequence (pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading work), which makes it possible to remove as many lexical difficulties as possible before perceiving biographical information, introduce the life and work of a Russian writer of a distant era and improve students’ speech skills.