Adopting the Thesaurus Approach to Develop Textual Competence among International Students while Teaching a Language for Special Purposes: Experience from Russian and Belarusian Higher Institutions

Abstract

The article addresses the issues of the textual competence formation using the thesaurus approach, and the importance of the textual competence development in foreign students who study in higher educational establishments in Russia and Belarus. It also posits that the textual competence is an important part of the communicative one. The thesaurus approach is proposed as a privileged tool when teaching international students to work with professionally oriented written and oral texts. The article proposes a set of steps (stages) to implement the thesaurus approach. It also introduces a framework of exercises and their types for each of the steps. The research is based on the data collected during English and Russian as a foreign language classes and is conducted in three universities of Russia and Belarus by means of observation, discussion, testing, and statistics analysis. Theoretical ground has been set for further research, focusing on the ways to assess the level of the textual competence development in students.