Teaching and methodological potential of home reading guides in practical English course

The authors of the article share their experience in teaching philology students of Saratov State University Home Reading aspect as part of Practical English Course. The article highlights the teaching and methodological potential of the Home Reading guides in the course of studies. The Home Reading guides are made to be used as a series of original readers in the form of workbooks for the students of four diff erent language profi ciency levels: Elementary + (A1+), Pre-Intermediate (A2), Intermediate (B1), Upper-Intermediate (B2). The above guides contain groups of tasks on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, reproduction and speaking to improve the needed competence. The guides develop phonetic competence (transcribing, preparing a passage for good reading with the correct pitch-and-stress structure, learning a passage by heart and reading it out), lexical and grammatical competence (looking up in dictionaries and giving English and Russian equivalents to the active vocabulary, doing tasks on translating the active vocabulary into English and Russian, on rephrasing it, and on searching for mistakes of diff erent type), retelling competence (drilling the needed structures to improve indirect speech skills to use while retelling the stories), speaking competence (preparing reports to answer the given questions for discussion of the stories). The guides for Intermediate (B1), Upper-Intermediate (B2) levels contain the tasks to develop text analysis skills, skills in looking for diff erent types of realia in texts with their further analysis. The article shows diff erent forms of assessment of the provided tasks and introduces some possible types of tasks and forms of assessment of the students with diff erent English language profi ciency levels.