TEACHING TOOLS FOR CRITICAL READING DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

With development of the Internet the world has become bigger and now people who are living in different parts of the world have the means to communicate with each other in their pockets, there are all sorts of social media websites with all kinds of bloggers, streamers and the like who amass multicultural audience; big companies and small businesses develop connections more rapidly; individuals in general have more opinions and points of view to consider, and because of that the ability to think critically is now more important than ever before in human history. That is why modern higher education institutions tend to teach their students critical reading which helps them develop many adjacent skills such as researching information, communicating with, understanding and tolerating people of different background. This means that future critically thinking professionals need to be able to consider problems from different angles and find solutions to them suitable for everyone. Moreover, a critically thinking person should have an ability to understand the meaning of the text and its subtext implied by the author, to take different viewpoints into consideration, analyze them wisely and disregard the negative background of communication. Purpose. The paper aims at considering the ways of developing critical reading skills through reading foreign periodicals. The authors offer a set of teaching techniques for critical reading skill formation. The key point here is that the work with the text presupposes several successive steps. Results. The consequence of using these teaching techniques will be the students’ ability to formulate goals and objectives, to set hypotheses, to assess their own and others’ judgments and put forward a compromise solution. In the future, reading any publication, they will be able to assess the opinion of the author, to see the degree of the author’s influence on the reader’s views, but, simultaneously, adequately receive the information transferred by the text itself. Practical implication. Therefore, the skill of critical reading opens up new opportunities for effective participation in foreign language communication, thanks to which mutual understanding between different nationalities becomes a reality.

Keywords

• critical reading
• critical thinking
• journalistic text
• foreign language
• cluster
• effective reading
• reflection
• tolerance
• cross-cultural communication