THE AUDITORY EXERCISE AS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL OF ARGUMENTATIVE SKILLS FORMATION IN LAW SCHOOL STUDENTS

Teaching professionally significant speech genres for a lawyer, including argumentative speech, is the basis for the development of students’ argumentative skills. The author pays special attention to the need to develop argumentative skills related to analytical listening. The skills necessary for analytical listening include: the ability to correlate the arguments of the communicant with the thesis put forward by them; the ability to identify the substitution of the thesis (complete or partial) in the speech of the communicant; the ability to identify contradictions in the arguments of the communicant; the ability to identify strong, weak, and untenable arguments in the communicant’s line of argument. During the ascertaining experiment, consisting in students fulfilling an auditory exercise, the difficulties faced by them in analyzing argumentative speech were identified. The author draws conclusions about the effectiveness of using the auditory exercise both for the purpose of diagnosing deficits of formation of argumentative skills necessary for analytical listening and for the purpose of their developing.