USE OF IT FOR FUTURE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ LINGUISTIC SELF-EDUCATION

Abstract

The article substantiates that large-scale implementation of information technologies will facilitate methodological support of future foreign language teachers’ linguistic self-education. The main functions and advantages of the author’s multimedia training package “English for Self-Education”, designed to support future foreign language teachers’ linguistic self-educational activities, are characterized. It is defined that the package is an open-ended multipurpose programmatic learning system, containing didactic, methodological, informational and reference materials. The package is based on general pedagogical, ergonomic and specific principles of informatization of education. It has a dual structure, which includes two levels. The first level contains 1) lexical-informational component that provides working with lexical and theoretical material, 2) training element, which enables practicing knowledge and skills, as well as mastering methods and means of autonomous managing, regulating and correcting the process of linguistic self-education, 3) control aspect, which allows realizing independent monitoring and evaluating the degree and quality of acquired knowledge and skills. The second level considerably extends didactic possibilities and educational resources of the package. It covers a wide range of extra learning materials of theoretical and practical nature that are available both in the package itself and beyond its limits through providing the access to the “virtual reality” within external resources of global network. All the above not only makes for activating students’ cognitive activity but also significantly enriches their language and sociocultural practice. The package enables comprehensive independent study of a foreign language, exercising self-diagnostics in order to detect gaps in the student’s foreign-language competence, performing intensive linguistic self-educational activities, constant monitoring the level of autonomously mastered foreign-language material, carrying out search for information, etc. Thus, the package provides optimal conditions for future foreign language teachers’ linguistic self-educational activities. Students have an opportunity to actualize the adaptive algorithm of building the individual trajectory of linguistic self-education in accordance with their psychological features and personal educational needs. It is shown that working with the package results in students’ receiving an external and internal educational products, namely improving foreign-language knowledge and skills, along with gaining personal experience of linguistic self-educational activities. It is grounded by the example of the proposed package that comprehensive use of IT significantly optimizes the process of linguistic self-education.