The Development of Students' Discursive Competence in FL Learning

The present research touches upon major issues pertaining to the domain of English language exams preparation as the problem of working with undergraduates stays extremely relevant for all those involved in the process of Teaching English as a second language (TESL). The project will begin with analysing several views on competence and subcompetences, then describe discourse competence; secondly, certain notions will be viewed from the psycholinguistic perspective, and finally it deals with contemporary techniques for developing discourse competence. The project also discusses some recently proposed solutions concerning the development of discourse competence. The practical part of the paper includes a discourse analysis dealing with a transcription of an undergraduates' speech fulfilling a task of the Unified State Exam (USE). The general mistakes are singled out and then their possible reasons are discussed along with some solutions. Finally, several Russian textbooks used at the English language lessons are critically analysed from the point of view of discourse competence. It is expected that the quality of the preparation provided by the textbooks will be unsatisfactory that is why some exercises for the development will be proposed.