Ya. K. GROT’S METHOD IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS AT THE END OF THE 19th CENTURY

The paper analyses academician Ya. K. Grot’s main ideas concerning teaching foreign languages and their implementation in Russian and French textbooks at the end of the 19th century. Basic principles of his concept dealing with improving mother tongue teaching at schools are well-known in history. At the same time, the scholar’s views on foreign languages in education didn’t receive special attention, although they are still interesting nowadays, when questions of content of the secondary education and a place of the humanities in it, in particular, languages — classical and ancient ones — have been risen up. First, the article examines peculiarities of Russian approach to the teaching of mother languages, both ancient and modern, which evolved as a result of scientific and pedagogical discussions, in which Ya. K. Grot took an active part. An important place in linguistic education was given to the comparison of history and structure of languages to be learnt, especial- ly to the conscious possession of native language grammar as the basis for the development of foreign ones. Grot’s original concept of teaching native language, ancient as well as modern, as a single complex with all its parts firmly linked together, influenced the development of a range of well-liked textbooks on foreign languages for secondary schools in Russia. The second part of the present paper is devoted to the influence of Ya. K. Grot’s method on school manuals of Russian as foreign language at the initial period of teaching Russian in France at the end of the 19-th century. The author studies several textbooks written by Ch.-F. Reiff and L. Léger (1878), V. Jaclard (1897), P. Boyer and N. Speranski (1905) and others, which were widely in use at schools and universities that time.