Assessment of Foreign Language Communication Skills as a Component of Functional Literacy of Primary School Students

The aim of the article is to consider the problem of assessing the communication skills of primary school students as an aspect of functional literacy. The authors consider functional literacy as the ability to solve practical everyday problems using the gained knowledge. The necessity and possibility of the formation of primary school students' functional literacy in education is interpreted ambiguously. Most scholars point to the goal of the primary school, which is to form elementary literacy (reading, writing and numeracy, etc.). The results of PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS international studies of the quality of education allow recognizing the urgency of the problem of assessing schoolchildren's functional literacy. This article is an attempt to comprehend and study this problem in terms of the continuity of education of primary and secondary schools. Communication skills are an aspect of functional literacy. As a result of a meta-analysis of sources in Russian, more than 100 publications related to communication skills or communicative actions were found. The approaches to the structure and classification of communicative skills presented in the literature are reviewed in the article using content analysis. The authors state that various authors attribute communicative skills either to subject learning outcomes or to metasubject results. The groups of skills that are included in the structure of communication skills indicated in various scientific sources do not coincide. It is possible to single out psychological prerequisites for communicative skills (empathy, assessment, creative component) and actual skills (meaningful reading, argumentation, the use of appropriate linguistic means, etc.). A comparative analysis of the structure of communication skills in the current federal state educational standard of primary education (Russia, 2009) and in the draft of the new edition of the standard (2019) showed that the new edition of the standard to a greater extent reflects the aspect of the formation of functional literacy, the focus on solving life problems, communication in everyday situations. The results of an empirical study of the formation of the communicative skills of primary school students among the participants of the Quality Cluster project are presented in the article. The data of criterion-related diagnostics, carried out over three years, allow stating the following. Communicative tasks reflecting the situations of everyday life are unusual for younger students. In addition, students' experience in such communicative situations has an impact on the results of diagnostics. According to the results of the study, it can be assumed that primary school teachers do not know how to form functional literacy. The problem under consideration requires further research in the aspects of adjusting the content of education in primary school and training a teacher for the formation of functional literacy of primary school students.

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