COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS DEVELOPMENT IN BLENDED LEARNING RUSSIAN LANGUAGE COURSE

Development of oral communication skills is one of the most important aims of language teaching and the most crucial to reach. Modern period with its challenges demands new methods and ways of developing language skills. Face-to-face teaching when the teacher transmits not only knowledge and skills but also shares emotions and world view experience proves to be the most efficient in achieving communicative competence, but it's not that easy to implement individual approach to the needs of every student in traditional learning environment. Online learning gives students more flexibility, but it lacks the sense of belonging to a community and not always meets the human need for socialization. Blended learning as the combination of face to face and online environments helps to give the learner wider learning grounds and has vast possibilities in enriching the traditional learning. The paper aim is (1) to review the features of blended learning as Russian language study environment; (2) to discuss its effects on the success in achieving communicative competence, (3) to examine the outcomes of the pilot project. A pilot project lasted for half a year, with three groups of students participating in it-students studying Russian language in a face-to-face interaction, international online language learners, and a group engaged in blended learning Russian course. On-line part of the study program included discussion groups, web sites, web and computer-based modules, tests and surveys, online conferences, used as diachronic and synchronic learning. All the students were beginners with no command of Russian at the initial stage. According to pre-and post-assessment and survey results, blended learning gives better success rates than the other two methods-online-learning and traditional approach. The results of this study indicated a positive relationship between students' final evaluation of oral communicative skills and combining online and traditional learning. Adding the human interaction to online course helped to create more valuable learning environments. These results highlight the need for further comprehensive analysis of required percentage of traditional face-to-face instruction and online section of the program.