Linguodidactic model of developing terminological competence among foreign students of mining profiles within the training course of Russian as a foreign language

<jats:p>The study addresses development of terminological competence among foreign students of mining profiles within the training course of Russian as a Foreign Language at the pre-university preparatory stage. Its relevance is determined by the growth in the number of foreign student entering Russian universities (over 355 thousand in 2024), the increasing share of admissions to the training programs such as Applied Geology, Mining Engineering, and Geological Prospecting, and the fact that conventional syllabus of Russian as a Foreign Language of the engineering profile do not account for the subjectconceptual specific features of the mining industry. The aim is to develop and empirically verify a linguodidactic model ensuring development of four components of the terminological competence, e.g. lexical-semantic, grammatical-syntactic, textual-discursive, and communicative-pragmatic, at the B1 threshold level. The empirical base comprises a pedagogical experiment conducted during the 2023/2024 academic year with 56 participants from six world regions (East Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, CIS); the experimental (n = 28) and the reference (n = 28) groups were formed by stratified randomization. The methods applied include comparative analysis of syllabus of Russian as a Foreign Language, selection of a corpus of 834 terms by frequency, a formative pedagogical experiment with a three-stage assessment, and statistical processing using the Wilcoxon criterion. It was established that the final integral indicator of the experimental group (EG) reached 78.6 points versus 58.7 in the reference group (RG) (a difference of 19.9 points, p &lt; 0.01); the B1 threshold (60 points) was achieved by 89.3% of the EG students and 42.9% of the RG students; the average reduction in the lexical-grammatical errors in the EG amounted to 47.2% across the eight categories. A four-level linguodidactic model has been formulated in the following way: “subject-conceptual base – lexicalgrammatical module – text-genre module – professional-communicative module” with differentiation of teaching strategies by the dominant error components and the national-language profile of the students.</jats:p>