Tatyana Protopopova

The problem of learning and acquiring good command of foreign languages by students of non-linguistic universities has many aspects of consideration and new approaches, but it has not been fully researched. One of these approaches is related to the national mentality of students. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that the relationship between mentality and language from a scientific point of view is investigated recently. Despite the available research works in this area, this issue has not yet been sufficiently studied. Hence it can be concluded that the mentality and learning foreign languages are interrelated and require further research. The aim of this work is to study the influence of national mentality on learning a foreign language by students of non-linguistic universities (on the example of the mentality of the Sakha people). Leading approaches to achieve the objectives of the study are: linguistic-cultural approach that will help to determine the influence of living national language, material and spiritual culture on language processes; process approach, determining the whole complex of continuously running mental processes in foreign language learning for simulation of the activity results; situational approach, identifying the opportunity to improve learning of a foreign language, taking into account the influence of the student’s national mentality. The study will result in determining the level of the national mentality influence on a foreign language learning. The national-specific features of the mentality of Yakut and English linguistic and cultural communities representatives will be revealed and the ways of their influence on the process of teaching a foreign language will be determined. The comparative analysis of Yakut and English national mentality features (national character, socionic types and concept spheres of Yakut and English languages) contributes to the development of a foreign language teaching model, taking into account the peculiarities of students’ mentality in order to overcome their difficulties in learning a foreign language. Our proposed approach to determining the influence of national mentality on foreign language learning by students of non-linguistic universities will provide an opportunity to develop a model of effective foreign language teaching, taking into account the peculiarities of the national mentality, namely the mentality of the Sakha people.

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.