The trend of combining traditions and innovation is a distinctive feature of education today: it represents an astonishing combination of the traditions in the field of education inherited in the past, and constant innovative ideas and modern teaching methods and education strategies, which is typical for the rapid development of high education thought today.
The scientific direction of the Department of Theory and Practice of Teaching Foreign Languages covers the issues of theory and practice of education, intercultural communication, the methodology of teaching foreign languages, as well as lexicology, word formation, phraseology, stylistics.
Europhras
The organization in work of which the faculty members of the department take the most active part is Europhras. The academic staffs of the department have been active participators of various events of this organization since 2001. Europhras is the European Society of Phraseology, it is a non-profit organization with its seat in Zurich. The problems discussed in these conferences are cross-language study of phraseology, cognitive approach to phraseology, phraseography, translation of idioms, phraseology in language teaching.
The aims of the organization are:
- exchanging information on European research in the field of phraseology, organizing conferences, publishing outcomes of researches of various project.
- advancement of young scholars and support of research projects in the field of phraseology.
- encouragement of worldwide international cooperation among scholars working in the field of phraseology.
- contact with other scholarly and scientific societies.
Lexicography
Lexicography in the comparative aspect is a compilation of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and reference books, applying the software. This branch of scientific research supposes the study of the basic concepts of lexicography, the description of the functions and principles of the lexicographic description, the history of the development of lexicography in Russia and abroad, the main problems in compiling a dictionary, the typology of dictionaries, the phenomenon of electronic dictionaries on the Internet and the organization of lexicographic databases.
Research laboratory ‘Intellectual technologies of text management’
Prof.Solnyshkina M.I.
Head of Research laboratory
Research goals: to develop automated model of effective reading which tailors the text for individual reader.
To achieve the goals, the laboratory plans to implement the following tasks:
- to reveal a set of expository metrics to assess Russian texts;
- to develop automated tool analyzing text complexity;
- to compile a corpus of texts ranked for wide scope of readers;
- to research comprehension specifics of various types of texts among various readers by conducting experiments;
- to introduce and test the strategies of teaching reading among various readers (2020);
- to develop and introduce interactive model of teaching reading strategies (2020).
Research relevance
Currently, a person faces social task of retrieving information from printed text rapidly and in full.
Moreover, the text complexity is getting increased due to progressing modern world and, thus, the reader lacks time to study the text in every detail. A resulting lack of understanding or misunderstanding of text may cause conflicts, mistakes, accidents, ruined lives.
Thus this research area is relevant due to the following factors: (1) a lack of parameters defining a ‘reader-text’ correlation; (2) a need to develop and introduce systems of automated assessment of text complexity applied to texts of various genres and length. This task implementation may contribute to increasing reading literacy among Russians.