The Organisation of Students′ Independent Work in the Process of the Formation of Their Professional Qualities in Additional Foreign Language Education
The Organisation of Students′ Independent Work in the Process of the Formation of Their Professional Qualities in Additional Foreign Language Education
Abstract
In this article, the author describes the actual situation existing in the system of higher education: education of an independent thinking specialist. The author of the article emphasises that the aim of modern education is to form in students the desire to replenish constantly their knowledge, in our case in the field of foreign languages (FL) to expand their horizons, practical skills of independent work in educational, scientific and professional activities, to strive for self-education.
At present, the problems of teaching LL are in the centre of attention of the school community, teachers, and scientists.
The aim of the article is to identify a new vector in the methodology of teaching IL as an academic subject in the system of higher education, outlining the current trends. The main methods are the analysis of foreign and domestic scientific literature and the study of the experience of teaching IL in other regions.
Also, close attention is paid to the digitalisation of modern foreign language education, which is very closely connected with students' independent work. The issues of training of a teacher of foreign language in the conditions of digitalisation of language education were not left without attention. The author came to the conclusion that the developed methodology of organising students' independent work in order to form their professional qualities is effective.
1. Introduction
The development of actual educational technologies is a distinctive feature of the modern Russian education, which is aimed at the formation of communicative competence of future specialists, which increases the communicative culture of the individual as a whole. In the process of forming the communicative competence of students in higher school, a foreign language (FL) teacher builds a system of training future specialists in the field of foreign language education, solves many pedagogical problems. At present, much attention is paid to training the competitive specialists with a high level of professional competence. The Russian business co-operation with foreign partners in the sphere of economy and business implies proficiency in the foreign language as one of the indispensable components of the professional competence. Training students in the language contributes to successful communication in the business sphere, ensuring the effective establishment of business contacts and the achievement of goals, which solves many professional problems.
2. Methods, techniques and technologies used in the study
The purpose of the article – the consideration of the essence of students′ independent work in the process of the formation of their professional qualities.
Statement of the task. The article is an attempt to identify the junctions and conditions of additional foreign language education in the organization of students′ independent work in the process of the formation of their professional qualities as the essential phenomenon of education. The author fried to develop the effective methodology – the lessons of English for teaching oral speech, which help to improve students′ communication skills.
During the research we used the following methods: analysis, comparison, systematization, specification and generalization as well as interviewing, observation and testing.
3. Main results
1. The study of a FL provides students with key competences that integrate into their ability to perform the effective professional activities and social interaction in a FL. When selecting key competences, a FL teacher is guided by the requirements set out in the State Standard of the Secondary Education. Among them, the following can be singled out, which are presented in Table 1:
Table 1 - Key competences
The ability to think systematically, which enables graduates to analyse complex situations and make the informed decisions within their professional activities. |
The ability to act independently under the conditions of uncertainty. Modern business often requires making decisions in situations where the information is not fully known. This competence helps students to become confident and independent in such situations. |
Willingness to take responsibility for the work they do. This is an important aspect of professional competence that helps professionals to be reliable and conscientious in their work. |
The ability to solve problems independently and effectively in the field of professional activity. The study of a FL develops the skills of analysing and searching for solutions, which enables students to cope with difficulties successfully arising in the workplace. |
The readiness for continuous professional growth and the acquisition of new knowledge. In today's world, the requirements for specialists are changing constantly, and mastering the language helps students to be ready for new challenges and update their knowledge. |
The sustainable aspiration for self-improvement, including self-knowledge, self-control, self-assessment, self-regulation and self-development. The study of a FL helps students to develop these skills and become more self-motivated and independent. |
The willingness to interact and co-operate positively with colleagues. The ability to communicate in a foreign language contributes to better mutual understanding and the effective co-operation with colleagues from different countries and cultures. It is important to note that these key competences are universal and can be developed in the process of studying any academic discipline, including the "Foreign Language" discipline. This emphasises the importance of foreign language skills in the modern education and professional training of students. |
An important component of a person's competitiveness is his/her command of the language. It is very important to establish business and intercultural contacts and relations . It helps students to socialise and get involved in business communities:
- a high level of the proficiency in the language, as it is possible to realise business and intercultural communication with the help of the language.
- increasing the scope of foreign language knowledge, skills and abilities.
- foreign-language professional training, which is aimed at establishing contacts, mastering business communication. As a result, students are engaged in correspondence, conduct telephone negotiations, organise and conduct meetings, and negotiations, participate in the international conferences, develop communicative basic competences that ensure the competitiveness of the specialists-professionals.
It is possible to form competences in students by means of various types of foreign language activities in the process of study, based on the professional training, socio-cultural activities, family traditions. Continuing education together develops a number of professional competences of students. Competences are based on knowledge and skills that help to make many decisions in a changing world. Integration of different disciplines contributes to the organisation of such language learning that forms students' professional competences: value-sense, general cultural, educational-cognitive, informational, communicative, socio-labour, personal self-improvement competences.
Professional competence is related to a person's ability to solve problems in the professional field. V.V. Serikov in his works argued that the situation of professional competence is training of truly globally educated, creatively and critically thinking specialists, susceptible to a versatile, organic vision and the analysis of complex social aspects of society, capable of finding new solutions to current problems . S.L. Rubinstein described general theoretical and methodological principles, according to which the personality of a learner manifests himself and develops in activity. Teaching is one of the types of activity, in the process of which the personality of future specialists develops, which forms and develops their needs and interests .
A university language teacher organises the extracurricular activities, and in this connection students develop a number of communicative competences in the process of studying language at the university, as well as professional competences in general. Thus, students are capable of systematic thinking; are capable of independent action in conditions of uncertainty; are ready to take responsibility for the work done; are able to find a solution independently and effectively to an existing problem in the field of professional activity; are ready for continuous professional growth, acquire new knowledge; strive for self-improvement (engage in self-knowledge, self-control, self-assessment, self-regulation and self-development); strive for creative self-realisation; are ready for a positive relationship between the students and their colleagues; are ready to develop their professional competences in the field of professional activity.
Independent work helps to organise the process of language learning, which is an important point in planning the learning process itself. The main types of planning of teaching work include prospective planning, which is carried out in thematic plans, and current planning, which consists in developing plans for individual lessons , .
Independent work (IW) is a learning activity that helps students to self-improve, self-develop and acquire new qualities, experience and knowledge. It involves three levels:
- a simple reproduction of the information received from the teacher;
- the application of this knowledge in new situations;
- finding the alternative ways of performing various tasks.
When students are involved in independent activities, they develop general competences specified in the standards. The systematic organisation of extracurricular independent work is characterised by positive results. For the purpose of the effective performance of IW, a teacher develops the methodological guidelines based on the content of curricula and the main tasks of IW. The extracurricular independent work helps to systematise and consolidate the acquired knowledge, develop cognitive abilities, activity, creative initiative, independence and organisation of students in general. This activity also develops research skills. In addition, the results of IW are often used in the process of preparation for final certification. IW is characterised by purposefulness, systematisation and productivity. Students should approach methodological tasks consciously. For this purpose, students should understand the main purpose of IW, analyse and identify the most important aspects to achieve the set tasks, as well as control their actions and mastered skills of self-control. This activity is a joint activity for both the student and the instructor. In this case, the instructor organises, advises and controls. He should clearly present the trajectory along which students go to the task at hand. Here the individual characteristics of each learner should be taken into account.
The organisation of IW contributes to the principle of individualisation, in this case students overcome the set difficulties. Very often they face not simple and not monotonous tasks. Problem-based tasks play a very important role in the organisation of IW. They require search and discovery of new solutions from students. Knowledge, skills and abilities obtained in the process of independent work can be tested during classroom classes, where students perform tasks using the material that was learnt during the educational process .
When a teacher organises IW in the course of teaching the first-year students, he/she tries to adapt the questions for the students according to the conditions of the university education. Here a great role is given to independent learning activities, self-education, self-organisation, the formation of skills and the skills of independent work. The extracurricular activities are predetermined by purposefulness, the following conditions should be observed: it is necessary to take into account the continuity in the process of the formation of communicative competence in students of the general education and the students of the 1-2 courses of higher education. In order to plan the learning activity of the teacher properly, it is necessary to select the right teaching material at the stage of the primary organisation of IW in teaching the language. In this situation, the teacher should take into account the fact that be correctly adapted the teaching and informative block, which he/she selected himself/herself, should, it is necessary for it to be understood correctly by the students themselves even at the emotional level , .
4. Discussion
1. A language teacher should organise his/her classes in such a way that, based on the students' needs, he/she can process the teaching material according to their emotional response, focusing on the students' subsequent motivation for independent learning. The organisation of IW requires the teacher to take into account not only the existing level of each student's knowledge of the language, but also the level of social and life experience of all students. The organisation of IW for students of non-linguistic departments in language teaching can be organised in the following way:
- to test the first-year students in order to establish their level of learning and to maintain some consistency and continuity in their learning;
- to conduct a questionnaire survey in order to identify requests and the requirements for the qualitative selection of the content of language teaching material;
- to activate the subject content of the language classes, to form the communicative competence for further independent filling in missing knowledge in the field of the studied language, based on the selected language and speech material.
At the Institute of Philology of Bunin Elets State University, teachers try to compile systematically methodical manuals, which are oriented to develop different types of speech activity in students. They select language exercises for students' IW, select text materials for students' independent study, plan all the types of IW. All this helps to teach students various methods, techniques aimed at self-learning, mutual learning, and work with the scientific literature, to acquaint students with the rational ways that help them to learn the language. Colleagues select texts of humanitarian character, having various themes, it is necessary to support students' sustainable motivation to fill in the missing knowledge independently in the field of language learning .
The independent work of students is effective if it is personally significant for them, justified, and its organisation uses methods that encourage students to engage in IW actively. Web 2.0 technologies , are a good example of organising this type of students' activity in the educational process. With the help of this approach, the teacher participates indirectly in students' independent activity to create the optimal conditions for its organisation, develops a system of different-level language tasks that allow each student to self-realise at the maximum level. In the organisation of students' independent activity in the process of language teaching, it is necessary to be guided by general pedagogical approaches. The structure of a training session usually includes three main stages (methodology of L.M. Friedman and I.Y. Kulagina): introductory-motivational, operational-cognitive; reflexive-evaluative .
Table 2 - The structure of a training session
Stage | The main characteristics of the stage |
The introductory and motivational phase | The students realise the main purpose of the forthcoming study of the topic of IW in the field of language learning, its place and role in the professional education, its practical and theoretical significance. The teacher guides students in the selected learning materials for IW. The students are required, first of all, to be psychologically ready for independent work. |
The operational and cognitive stage | Mastering the language knowledge included in the contents of the studied language topic independently, using different types and forms of academic work: essays, research papers on certain aspects, exercises that develop the ability to use unknown vocabulary correctly. The teacher constantly guides and evaluates the IW of the student team. |
The reflexive-evaluation stage | The study of the thematic material. The general summarisation of the results of work on the given topic. The main task is to develop the students' ability to analyse and synthesise the acquired knowledge, to self-assess reflexively, to develop the students' ability to select adequate methods and the techniques of IW, to evaluate the results of their activities. The final stage. The student plans his/her actions to perform independent tasks, realises and corrects his mistakes. |
Note: the methodology of L.M. Friedman and I.Y. Kulagina
5. Conclusion
Thus, the organisation of independent learning activities in teaching the language creates an educational environment, which results in the development of the productive learning activities that help to realise students' personal potential.
IW helps students to master the techniques of the cognitive activity. Independent learning has a topical character, as there is a transition to differentiated learning, there are different types of learning organisation in the higher education institutions. IW is based on distance learning according to an individual plan, on the use of the computer and other modern learning technologies. Properly organised IW contributes to the systematisation and the qualitative consolidation of the acquired knowledge and skills, deepening and the expansion of theoretical and practical knowledge of students.