Ludmila Sidorova

According to federal state educational standards of the third generation, foreign language proficiency belongs to the general cultural competence of university graduates. In a non-linguistic university, one of the tasks of teaching foreign languages is to increase the level of understanding professionally oriented texts. The introduction and widespread use of information and communication technologies and Internet technologies in education requires an adjustment of the means and methods of teaching foreign languages. Moodle has been considered as a learning tool towards promoting students’ reading comprehension. The participants were 156 EFL students, majoring in mathematics. They were taught three kinds of professionally-oriented informative reading: 1) perceptive informative reading; 2) evaluative perceptive reading; 3) creative informative reading. The goal of this study is to compare the level of foreign language reading comprehension before and after the course “Academic Reading” using LMS Moodle. During the course students of the experimental group had a wide reading practice in the format of Hot Potatoes, Treasure Hunt, Subject Sampler, Multimedia Scrapbook and Web-Quests. Prior to experiential learning, the level of understanding of foreign texts was 25% in the experimental group and 26% in the control group in extensive reading. After the experiment the data was 78% students showed high level of reading comprehension in the experimental group and only 43% students in the control group. At the beginning of the study only 18 % of students in experimental group and 15% of students in control group demonstrated high level of reading comprehension in intensive reading. After two years of experimental training the indicators reached 53% in the control group and 88% in the experimental group with a coefficient p> 0.05. In total, the level of understanding of the foreign language text increased on average by 50% in the experimental group, and by 20% in the control group.