Training academic reading and listening in the context of the final stage of the Russian national English Olympiad in English

The article examines the configuration of the receptive component of the final stage of the Russian National English Olympiad in English as a specific format for assessing and as a driver of instruction in academic reading and listening for uppersecondary students. The focus of the analysis is on the set of receptive tasks used in the final stages of the Olympiad in 2023-2025, which includes both conventional reading and listening formats and more complex integrated Listening & Reading models that require the simultaneous processing of several texts and input channels. The object of the study is the corpus of Olympiad tasks in reading and listening, while its subject is their linguodidactic and psycho-pedagogical characteristics: text level and genre features, the balance between local and global comprehension, the types of skills assessed, the formats of test items, as well as the type and degree of cognitive load determined by the materials used and the time and format constraints imposed on test-takers. The aim of the study is to describe the typology and internal logic of the receptive block, to identify its developmental potential as a means of forming strategies of academic reading and listening and, at the same time, its selective potential as a tool for identifying the most prepared participants, as well as to outline methodological implications for classroom and extracurricular preparation of Olympiad contestants. On the basis of the analysis, the article formulates practice-oriented recommendations for teachers on how to organise work with higher-level texts. The empirical basis consists of publicly available materials from the final stage of the Olympiad in English for 2023-2025, which include texts belonging to different genres (op-eds, academic and pseudo-academic discourse, essays, interviews, etc.) and a wide range of test formats: multiple choice, true/false and complex integrated items requiring test-takers to relate fragments drawn from several sources. The analysis draws on contemporary approaches to teaching reading and listening under conditions of increased cognitive load, on the concept of academic literacy and on research into academic competitions, including studies of the impact of Olympiad participation on students’ educational trajectories. The study demonstrates that current Olympiad tasks in reading and listening systematically go beyond assessing “technical” text comprehension and are designed to diagnose and develop metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension), skills of critical reading, interpretation of author stance, processing of implicit information and comparison of data across multiple sources, which brings the receptive component closer to formats of academic reading and listening typical of university settings. It is noted that the high density of textual material, the complexity of integrated formats and strict time limits simultaneously contribute to the development of academic reading and listening strategies (selecting key information, hierarchising meanings, distributing attention across channels) and reinforce the selective function of the Olympiad tasks, making them sensitive to differences in students’ initial resources, reading experience and access to high-quality training. The article concludes that there is a need for a purposeful re-orientation of school preparation towards the development of academic reading and listening: mastering strategies for working with lengthy and complex texts, and forming transversal skills of analysis, interpretation and critical evaluation of information that underpin reading and listening literacy in upper secondary school and at the early stages of university education. The article further emphasises the importance of more deliberate design of Olympiad tasks as an instrument not only of selection but also of learning, which supports the educational potential of participants, creates conditions for the accumulation of positive experiences of engaging with complex texts and helps to mitigate the risk of exacerbating educational inequality between different groups of school students. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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