PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR DEVELOPING READING LITERACY IN FOREIGN STUDENTS DURING UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Abstract

This article analyzes the psychological factors influencing the development of reading literacy in foreign students during the process of acquiring the Ukrainian language. The significance of motivation, attention, various types of memory, thinking, and anticipation is revealed as key psychological mechanisms that facilitate effective comprehension and interpretation of written texts. The psychophysiological foundations of reading are characterized, including visual perception (involving the recognition of letters, words, and syntactic structures), inner speech, text segmentation (the division of a text into semantically complete units – sentences and paragraphs), comprehension, and memory (retention of lexical and grammatical patterns as well as background knowledge).Typical challenges faced by foreign students when reading in Ukrainian are outlined, which are attributed to intercultural differences, the level of language proficiency, and features of cognitive style. A reading text is interpreted as a specially selected or constructed coherent statement that serves as a source of information, a means of teaching reading as a type of speech activity, and a tool for developing speech, lexical-grammatical skills, and intercultural communication.Examples of tasks are provided that aim to facilitate the process of understanding and interpreting texts.These tasks encourage the active use of linguistic means, promote the ability to adequately perceive textual information, and develop skills for independently extracting, generalizing, and analyzing professionally relevant information. It is emphasized that the development of reading literacy in foreign students during Ukrainian language instruction should be differentiated, flexible, and maximally oriented toward students’ individual characteristics. This ensures not only the advancement of text comprehension skills but also the formation of effective reading strategies as one of the essential transversal competencies in mastering Ukrainian as a foreign language.