The article explores issues about the advantages and difficulties of balanced bilinguals in conditions of language entropy. The purpose of the study is to identify the connection between activity regulation functions and executive functions in primary bilingual schoolchildren at the early stage of learning English under conditions of language entropy. The psychologist’s software package “Practice – MSU” was used, the results of which were processed using the Mann-Whitney U test, Wilcoxon T test, and structural equation modeling. Data were obtained confirming the syncretic effect of bilingualism in an educational situation. It has been established that learning English from primary school age by bilinguals is characterized by the productivity of attentional actions, which has effects on other control functions, in particular, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. This is due to the fact that bilingualism strengthens the processes of attention control, since the developing multilingual system requires increased attention resources to control the language being studied. The conclusion is formulated that the activation of the multilingual mental field in an educational situation ensures the activation of the system of regulatory processes of the cognitive level in primary school age.
The results obtained touch upon the solution of questions about the psychological and pedagogical conditions of the educational environment, which contribute to increasing the effectiveness of the pedagogical process in the early stages of learning English by primary schoolchildren with different language status.
Keyword(s) : foreign language
E-learning Issues in Online Marathon Application for Teaching a Foreign Language to Hard of Hearing Students
Nowadays, the need to improve Internet accessibility brings the assessment of e-learning formats effectiveness to immediate attention of researches in inclusive higher education. This project aim was to understand the specifics of implementation of an online marathon for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students who learn a foreign language. The authors noticed some differences in the dynamics and activity of DHH students doing online courses in different formats. There was no statistically significant difference in the amount of homework submitted on time between the two formats. However, when students participated in the online marathon, the number of students who completed most of the assignments on time, and the frequency of the submitted assignments increased. The number of completed assignments increased steadily during the online marathon, while the number of submitted assignments decreased in the middle part of the electronic learning course. The microcourse which was designed and implemented in the online marathon format for DHH students at the M.T. Kalashnikov IzhSTU was included in the list of the “Marathon of Best Practices for Applying New Technologies for Education, Training, and Socialization of Students with Limited Health Abilities and with Disabilities in the Universities of the Russian Federation.”
Distance Teaching of Professional Intergroup Communication to Non-Linguistic Students
The relevance of this research is due to significant changes in the labor market caused by the transformation of the modern world, when the demand for professionals who can study in a digital environment, as well as carry out cross-cultural communication and interaction with remote business partners, has sharply increased. This article identifies the main difficulties arising in the process of teaching intergroup dialogue and professionally-oriented interaction to non-linguistic students and also proposes new organizational and methodological approaches aimed at overcoming these difficulties. The aim of the research is to test the experimental methods of distance teaching of dialogic speech as a means of adaptation of non-linguistic students to intergroup communication in the digital environment. Such research methods as the experiment, observation, and the method of open and closed-ended questionnaires were used. The statistical significance of the obtained data was tested with the help of the student’s paired t-test and the Fisher test. The article describes the experimental distance teaching of communication in a virtual environment simulating professional intercultural interaction. The organizational and methodological approaches elaborated by the authors give an opportunity to form an educational foreign language environment, which trains non-linguistic students in intergroup communication with remote partners. The pedagogical tools tested in practice contribute to the effectiveness of teaching students with a low level of foreign language proficiency. The materials presented in the article allow us to create new technologies of foreign language distance teaching and will be in demand by specialists in the field of higher education pedagogies.
Learners’ success and self-esteem in foreign language reading comprehension
Demands for a high-level development of foreign language reading comprehension skills and competences are now escalating and processing of foreign language text information is a matter of course. Pupils and teachers are faced with the need to work with textual information in more complicated ways, in which self-esteem plays an important role. This paper analyses learners’ success of reading comprehension in foreign language and real self-esteem in acquiring those skills. Self-esteem helps to promote language self-confidence, the learner’s level of aspiration, and adjustment to perception of foreign language structure. As long as the learner does not really perceive themselves (real “self”), it is difficult to talk about understanding lexical meanings and their real perception of grammatical structures in the text. The research goal was to find differences in self-esteem and success in foreign language reading comprehension skills with respect to categories of comprehension (specifically: I always understand everything; I have a lot of problems with text understanding; specifically: I experience difficulties with understanding unknown words; problem with understanding long sentences; difficulty with understanding the unfamiliar topic of the text; pictures help me in understanding; guiding questions help me in understanding). The research question was whether the self-image of learners in relation to the skill of foreign language reading comprehension is realistic given their real success in this skill. The research was carried out in the Slovak Republic on a sample of 327 respondents and found differences in subjective perception of understanding and success in reading comprehension skills. The research showed a low real self- image of learners especially in categories of global character in respect to the average understanding of foreign language texts.
On the Issue of Intensification of Teaching a Foreign Language in a Non-linguistic Institution
Update of the research problem is associated with the software of the educational process in higher
educational institutions in this domain as a “foreign language”. The article discusses the most
important aspects of the intensification of teaching a foreign language in non-language high school;
possible orientation of a foreign language in the future professional activity; the use of certain
approaches to teaching foreign languages, in particular, intensive training approach as a way to
intensify the training; the use of intensive training principles; consideration of factors of intensification
of training; the use of methods of learning a foreign language in non-language high school; creation
of certain components of the educational environment for teaching a foreign language. The author
reveals the importance of the integration of various approaches to the intensification of training
in order to optimize the entire system of organization of cognitive activity of students. The article
analyzes the possibility of using situational principle which involves the study of a foreign language
on the basis of situations. The article shows how in teaching a foreign language in non-language
high school there’re used some interactive forms of practical sessions. In this regard, it is concluded
that learning a foreign language speech activity on the basis of the communicative component of the
intensification of training must be systematic, targeted as close as possible to the conditions of reality
in order to achieve a positive result in learning a foreign language.