Developing Supplementary Teaching Materials for Shaping Metadisciplinary Skills in the Context of Developing Productive Skills in a Foreign Language

The present work discusses the effectiveness of incorporating metadisciplinary skills into the speaking and writing tasks done by the students in the context of enhancing the efficiency of acquiring the approximate approved federal programme for high school. The experiment was conducted in the two groups of participants – the 10 and 11-graders in one of the Moscow schools. The essence of the experiment was in the students’ evaluation the complexity of the final offered tasks after the course where in the 10th grade there were tasks with artificially incorporated metadisciplinary skills, while in the 11th grade the final tasks didn’t include the latter and corresponded to those offered by the coursebook. The completion of the day-to-day tasks preparing the students for the final control tasks relied upon the reversed principle: 10-graders completed the tasks offered by the coursebook and not containing much metadisciplinary skills, whereas 11-graders did the tasks with the increased or fully introduced number of such. Hence, 10-graders (doing the current tasks with the absence or a fewer number of metadisciplinary skills) were to evaluate the complexity of the final control tasks with incorporated metadisciplinary skills, while 11-graders – vice versa: doing the ongoing tasks with metadisciplinary skills, they needed to evaluate the complexity of the final tasks with the absence of such. The results of the experiment prove that the existence of metadisciplinary skills in the tasks done by the students leads to their evaluation of the tasks without them as easier, what increases the efficiency of the acquisition of the federal programme in English in high school.