Polycode vs verbal text in academic lecture discourse

This article explores the effectiveness of using policode text for teaching humanitarian theoretical subjects. The hypothesis was that the explanation with the use of policode text examples increased the effectiveness of teaching due to subjective mechanisms of perception, based on cognitive-emotional perception of the text. The likeliness of application of such strategy is quite high, as a normal lecture is a multimodal phenomenon. The experiment was run in Spring of 2020 among philology students of Saint-Petersburg’s State University enrolled in the course “Linguistic foundations for teaching Russian as a foreign language. Theory of text”. Their answers revealed that policode text had a greater potential for interpretations, based on critical perception of the text. The students demonstrated ability to incorporate personal emotional perception of the text with its logical interpretation, and theoretical constructs for text analysis. Non-native speaking students used compensatory strategy of describing abstract concepts through concrete phenomenon. Moreover, regular use of policode texts appeared to be a motivator by allowing opportunity to see the universality of discussed philological principles, by allowing to teach functional reading and critical perception of the texts.