Keyword: «student autonomy»

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.

In the rapidly changing conditions of both the educational and work processes, independent learning skills are more a necessity than a desirable requirement for its participants. The relevance of the problem under consideration is determined by specific requirements associated with English language teaching at a particular non-linguistic university where the students are supposed to have a high level of language proficiency and the academic load implies a large amount of independent work during vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, a growing trend towards shift to online learning calls for building students' autonomy skills. Therefore, the article aims at description of development conditions of learner autonomy to promote English vocabulary acquisition in non-linguistic students. The study was carried out from the perspective of constructivism learning theory which holds that knowledge is constructed by human upon foundation of previous experience and in an interaction with other people. Furthermore, the basis of the lexical approach is used which puts emphasis not on a large amount of exercises aiming at a complete vocabulary acquisition, but on the practice spread over time. The analysis of the academic literature made it possible for the author to identify the basic components of learner autonomy geared to expansion of students' English vocabulary – giving students control over their learning, use of student-centered approach, mastering vocabulary learning strategies and self-reflection skills, building peer-assessment skills, use of collaborative learning, raising motivation, teacher's facilitative style. The discussion of each component is accompanied by hands-on recommendations. The theoretical significance of the research lies in the fact that the seven identified components make up the model of formation of learner autonomy that fosters revisiting teacher-student relationships and empowering them with freedom of choice and more responsibility for their learning. The practical significance of this article lies in the possibility of conducting effective work with foreign language vocabulary by means of learner autonomy and tailoring its components to the learning goals and objectives of language courses.