Differentiated approach in teaching Russian as a state language: specifics of developing assessment funds for humanities and technical specialties

Abstract

The article reveals a multidimensional problem of forming funds of assessment tools for Russian as the state language in higher education of the Russian Federation, where the heterogeneity of the student body, differences in professional trajectories, levels of speech preparation, and interference of the native language among representatives of the peoples of the Russian Federation for whom Russian is not native determine the need for professionally oriented differentiation of assessment materials sensitive to the specifics of humanities and technical fields. For students of a humanities profile, linguistic competence serves as the main resource for working with argumentative discourse, critical analysis of sources, and extended scientific text, whereas for technical specialties priorities include conciseness, terminological accuracy, and the genres of technical documentation, instructions, and official-business style. This requires a rethinking of the traditional understanding of differentiation, which previously reduced mainly to the level of language proficiency, toward integration of linguodidactic, competence-based, and qualimetric foundations that ensure reliability, reproducibility of measurements, and compliance with the descriptors of universal competencies in federal state educational standards. Analysis of existing practices reveals the dominance of unified, standardized closed-type tasks demonstrating low predictive validity with respect to graduates’ real communicative success, since they ignore the genre-stylistic registers of professional communication and do not permit assessment of the ability to apply linguistic means in contexts meaningful for future professional activity. Expert ranking of competence parameters confirms fundamental divergences in priorities: the ability to create argumentative text and stylistic adequacy dominate in the humanities profile, while command of official-business style and terminological accuracy acquire greater significance for technical fields, with the universal role of scientific style and basic orthographic and punctuation literacy retained as a background component. On this basis a two-component architecture of the assessment fund is substantiated, in which the invariant block ensures unity of requirements for the normative foundations of language command, while the variable block, which constitutes a substantial portion of the total volume, is adapted by altering the typology of tasks, assessment criteria, and weighting coefficients – including reviews, argumentative essays, and stylistic analysis for humanities students and official memoranda, editing of technical documentation, and annotations to design solutions for technical profiles. Comparative analysis of performance results attests to the pronounced advantage of the differentiated approach, manifested in increased content completeness, stylistic adequacy, and functional literacy, especially noticeable among students of technical profiles where the stylistic conflict between familiar professional models and the proposed tasks is eliminated. This leads to a relative gain in indicators of up to 20% without lowering requirements for the normative foundation, whose stability is confirmed by minimal differences on the criterion of linguistic correctness and high correlation with basic skills. The data obtained reveal the motivational-developmental potential of such an approach: the high perceived relevance of tasks to the future profession enhances interest, cognitive engagement, and completeness of performance, reducing the proportion of unfinished work and promoting deeper assimilation of communicative strategies through awareness of their pragmatic value, which accords with the division of competence into systemic-linguistic and functional-pragmatic levels. The proposed model demonstrates flexibility for scaling to other language-cycle disciplines, integration with professional standards, and transformation of the assessment procedure into a substantive element of specialist training within a multicultural educational space, while possessing sufficient reliability for accreditation procedures and methodological recommendations. Thus the abstract makes it possible to establish the main content of the work, determine its relevance for improving language education at a non-linguistic university, and reach an informed decision on consulting the full text of the article for detailed acquaintance with design mechanisms, interpretation of results, and practical implications in the context of contemporary requirements for universal competencies.