Sociocultural commentary in teaching high school students to comprehension of a literary text

Perceiving and understanding literary text is difficult for schoolchildren as this kind of text includes implicit meanings, metaphors and certain standards of word usage. Students' linguistic and sociocultural competences are not developed enough so they not always can eliminate textual lacunas, the result of cultural shift. Basing on the experiments and observation the author comes to conclusion that students make mistakes interpreting the text because of narrow encyclopedic knowledge. That is why teaching students using socio-cultural commentary can make perceiving a literary text easier for them. The theory of teaching Russian as a foreign language provides certain hints on commenting a literary text. However nowadays students should be taught to use publishing commentary and create their own one while learning the native language and literature. The article shows that both linguistic elements (unusual word usage, lexemes limited in usage, complicated syntactical constructions, deviations from modern language norms) and extralinguistic factors (sociocultural knowledge that make the context) are to be commented on. The author describes the types of exercises based on text commenting, underlines the necessity to use reliable literary and historical sources, search engines. The author also states the importance of teaching the students to special techniques aimed to deal with lacunas (defining lexemes, putting questions based on the text, etc.), to offer tasks connected with intertextual commentary, composing hyperlinks, bookmarks and glossaries for the text, etc. The article offers the examples of review questions and assigments for students.