School of cases

"School of cases" is a set of works consisting of the complex of interactive vocabulary and grammar presentations. The complex includes: 1) lexical and grammatical presentation (LGP) on prepositional-case system of the Russian language, which is a computer-based training program designed for the introduction and practicing of new grammatical material, and is used as multimedia support for Russian lessons; 2) guidelines for teachers on the use of LGP on the lessons of Russian as Foreign describing the optimal sequence of teacher’s actions in the course of each presentation.

Lexico-grammatical presentations are created in Microsoft Office PowerPoint environment, making it uncomplicated to use, available to any teacher.

Complex of LGP "School of cases" includes the following sections: parts of speech (adjective, noun, ordinal numeral, personal and possessive pronoun) and subsections that cover the prepositional-case system in the sphere of a certain part of speech, affixes and their meanings, declensional questions, verbs and prepositions that are used with a certain case; types of inflections and declination system; speech patterns, demonstrating the use of each case forms in the speech at the sentence level. In the menu, the teacher first selects a part of speech, then - the case under consideration.

Each presentation is a standalone software product, which reflects a certain grammatical topic that can be studied at one or more lessons. "School of cases" provides a variation of the modern language class, providing the teacher with opportunities for variations: he can build a lesson on the basis of only one presentation or use the presentation as part of a combined lesson. Presentations within a certain grammatical topics are provided with summary tables, which organize and generalize the grammatical facts learnt, as well as interactive tables, hypertext case forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals.

Features of PowerPoint environment maximize the basic principle of education - the principle of clarity. All photo-illustrations, drawings and diagrams that are used in presentations, have been carefully selected and mainly are to get rid of any difficulty in understanding the grammatical material, thus serve as a means of semantization of language units, and in the long run help visually recreate a particular speech situation. This approach encourages students’ abstract thinking in order to establish an association between the grammatical phenomena and communicative units, organizes their knowledge, removes the psychological barrier and improves the emotional state of students.

It is known that the study and assimilation of the case system of the Russian language is difficult for the majority of foreign students, and "School of cases" will help them to gain systematic knowledge of language means and rules, as well as lexical and grammatical skills needed in speech activity.

The teachers of our department have been actively using "School of cases" on a practical training on the lessons of Russian as Foreign and confirm the high didactic effect of the lessons, conducted with the help of this multimedia technology.