TEACHING RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN ARMENIAN SCHOOLS: HISTORICAL ASPECT

The necessity of this study was conditioned by the need to create scientific basis for writing the history of teaching Russian to Armenian students. The aim of the study was to establish the corpus of the most significant textbooks and methodological works that determined the ways of developing the theory and practice of teaching Russian to Armenian pupils. The materials of this study were the Russian language textbooks for Armenian pupils and the methodological works that are stored in funds in the Russian National Library, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Armenian National Library, and the Library of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. The researchers used the methods of historico-pedagogical and linguodidactic analysis of sources. During this study, about 30 textbooks and more than 20 methodological works, which are necessaries for describe the history of teaching Russian to Armenian pupils, have been revealed. Among them are textbooks of K. Sarafova, A. Varagshapadsky, 1. Bzhishkyan, textbooks and methodical works written by R.L. Melkumyan, G.M. Agababyan, 1. Yesadzhanyan. It was established that the main feature of the theory and practice of teaching Russian to Armenian pupils was the using the comparative method and translation in the process of teaching. The important peculiarity of the last 50 years is the orientation of teaching to the practical training goals, the interest to the elements of culture and to the innovative educational technologies, which completely agrees with the worldwide trends in the language education. The data obtained during the research can form the basis of a large systematic work about the history of teaching Russian to Armenian pupils.