Activation of cognitive processes in teaching a foreign language to higher school students of the specialty 014 secondary education

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to comprehensively analyze the conceptual model of learning foreign languages used in the Ukrainian academic system. The main tasks are to describe the components of this model and to illustrate its effectiveness in teaching to higher school students of the specialty 014 Secondary education. To consider this issue, it is necessary to establish the psychological factors influencing the success of acquiring language competencies, trace the evolution of the principles of organizing the process of mass foreign language teaching in Ukraine and analyze the arsenal ofpedagogical tools recommended for use in a modern audience in terms of their impact on the cognitive activity of students. In addition, we will have to pay attention to the nature of the phenomenon of mastering a foreign language in general and consider the features of this phenomenon in terms of learning in a Ukrainian-speaking language environment, without direct contact with the foreign language being studied in daily use, which will clarify the range of goal setting for teachers and students of higher education.

Research course

The conceptual model describing the process of learning a foreign language consists of four main components representing four dynamic processes that form the cognitive sphere in the formation of a linguistic personality: academic, cognitive, socio-cultural and linguistic. These four components are a complex system and are interdependent. Let's look at each of them separately.

When a student starts learning a foreign language in the absence of an authentic socio-cultural environment, tension increases in a number of dynamically developing cognitive processes. The genesis of this phenomenon is quite clear: the linguistic processes and phenomena that the student is forced to face relate to a culture alien to him/her. For a full-fledged study of a foreign language, it is advisable to organize its teaching in such a way that, along with linguistic aspects, its regional, historical and cultural criteria are taken into account (Bihych, Borysko, Borets'ka, 2003: 165-198).

While solving the problem of removing the socio-cultural barrier, a practical aspect is important: it is necessary to organize the cognitive activity of students in such a way that they are involved in the independent study of the socio-cultural component of the foreign language being studied. There are two popular ways to solve this problem: indirect (using additional literature of a regional nature, involving authentic sources of regional information: blogs, vlogs, films, etc.) and direct (organizing direct communication with native speakers of the culture of the language being studied) (Bakhrushyn). The purpose of these events is to update the cognitive component of the perception of a foreign language. In other words, as a result of a deeper acquaintance with the socio-cultural component of a foreign language, students often come to an independent realization of the practical significance of this discipline, which positively affects the motivation for its further development.

The opportunity to participate in international conferences, often provided by universities to the most successful and active students, also contributes to the development of academic and linguistic components of foreign language perception, the formation of both professional and secondary linguistic personality of a student, and ultimately -- the development of one's future career. After graduation, a specialist who has received such training is ready to conduct scientific activities and maintain cooperation with international organizations in one's professional field, which favorably distinguishes one from candidates in the labor market.

Linguistic processes occurring in the student's cognitive sphere are also closely interrelated with other components of the model. Taking into account this fact, for the successful formation of language skills within the framework of the curriculum of the specialty, it is necessary to understand both purely linguistic processes (the innate ability of a person to acquire oral speaking and writing skills) and extralinguistic factors, such as the formation of cognitive interest in the framework of educational activities in foreign language classes and independent work of a student with taking into account the requirements of the working curriculum of the discipline "Foreign language of professional orientation" (Nikolayeva, 2003: 77-97). In order to form language competencies at a level that meets the requirements of the curriculum of a foreign language course, it is necessary to master both the oral and written systems of the studied language in a number of linguistic aspects, including phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse. It is quite obvious that in order to achieve a high academic level of mastering a foreign language course, a student must have highly developed skills in the relevant aspects of the Ukrainian language proficiency, which demonstrates the obvious relationship between linguistic and academic components. In addition, as mentioned above, achieving a high level of foreign language competencies is impossible without involving the socio-cultural and cognitive components of a foreign language, and improvement in these areas supports a positive attitude of a student to one's cognitive abilities and forms motivation for further improvement both in the profession and in language learning (Nikolayeva, 2010: 11-15).

The third component of specialist training is the academic development of a student: an aspect that takes into account academic performance in all disciplines. With the successful assimilation of each subject, the student's cognitive activity becomes more complex and complex, expanding one's sociolinguistic and discursive skills. However, there is no doubt that at the stage of obtaining higher education, a student must already possess basic linguistic and socio-cultural competencies, which allows one not to form a new, but to improve one's proficiency in a foreign language of a professional orientation, achieving significant academic success, which stimulates the cognitive activity of the individual. model foreign language ukrainian academic higher school

The fourth component of the conceptual model demonstrating the interrelationship of dynamic processes in the cognitive sphere is the emphasis on the development of student's cognitive activity. As it has already been demonstrated above, the cognitive component is closely related to other types of mental processes occurring in the cognitive sphere of the student's personality when learning a foreign language in a professional direction. The content of a professionally-oriented foreign language course should combine the relevance of scientific and linguo-didactic components: pedagogical practice demonstrates that the use of outdated educational literature in the educational process reduces the cognitive activity of students, which does not contribute to the successful acquisition of foreign language competencies. Thus, the importance of the cognitive component in the training of a specialist with a high level of foreign language competencies is undeniable, and one of the necessary conditions for its implementation is the constant updating of the content of educational literature for teaching a foreign language in a professional direction, providing for the selection of educational material that takes into account both the latest achievements of natural sciences and modern linguistic and didactic approaches (Manzhos, Havrylyuk, 2016: 24-41).

All four components - socio-cultural, academic, cognitive and linguistic - are interdependent. Uneven implementation of the components can slow down the pace of the overall dynamics of a student's development and negatively affect one's formation as a scientist and professional.

Based on the results of the historical analysis carried out within the framework of the problems of this study, the following observation seems interesting to us: determining the place of a foreign language among other educational disciplines can serve as a kind of indicator of the socio-political accents of the era and indirectly allows us to characterize the goal setting of a foreign language course. In different types of social structure, priority is given to different aspects of linguistic and didactic goals. The recent history of teaching foreign languages in Ukrainian education demonstrates this quite clearly.

In modern Ukraine, foreign language education is formally publicly available and covers all levels of public education from primary to higher education, however, in practical terms, the problem of language literacy and accessibility of language education remains relevant. The task of stimulating the student's desire to use foreign language skills comes to the fore, which would strengthen one's integration into the global cultural and scientific context. The problem of ensuring the effectiveness of training, maintaining a high level of motivation of a student, one's desire for self-improvement remains urgent. The problem is aggravated by the shortage of qualified teaching staff in the state system of mass foreign language education and the low demand for a foreign language in the daily life of a student living outside a foreign language environment. This set of problems poses difficult tasks for foreign language teachers at all levels of the Ukrainian educational system.

In a multilingual environment devoid of direct contact with the foreign language being studied, the task of foreign language education in non-linguistic universities in modern Ukraine today is associated with a special set of difficulties. First of all, this is the problem of the goal-setting crisis. The gap between the growing accessibility of the artificial language environment - applied and fiction literature, software, video materials and music - and the still low level of mass foreign language literacy in our country is paradoxical. The social reasons for this should not be attributed exclusively to the field of material support for educational institutions; the crisis of public consciousness regarding foreign language education in Ukraine is based on a much more serious problem. For a student who, for one reason or another, is far from intending to travel and is not inclined to cultural and linguistic self-improvement, the expediency of educational activities for the compulsory acquisition of a foreign language specialty is not obvious (Nikolayeva, 2003: 102-111). The psychological reasons for this are related to the increasing informatization of society, the side effect of which is an increase in the level of "littering" of modern human consciousness, to which the psyche responds by turning on the protective mechanisms of "clip thinking" and a general decrease in cognitive activity. Therefore, to cope with the inertia of a student's consciousness, to overcome his/her laziness and awaken cognitive activity is the task facing any practicing teacher today, and a teacher of a foreign language in particular. It should be borne in mind that the effectiveness of learning a foreign language at a university is reduced under the influence of a number of factors.

These factors include:

1) a limited number of hours for classroom lessons devoted to learning a foreign language;

2) the number of students in language groups, which often exceeds the norm necessary for effective learning;

3) the heterogeneity of the level of foreign-language competencies of first-year students, which requires some of them to forcibly study all aspects of the language, often leading the student to frustration, negatively affecting other components of the cognitive sphere of a student (Holtgraves, 2002: 63-98).

Therefore, it is especially important for teaching a foreign language at a university to master effective teaching methods and techniques. They will be discussed further in relation to each type of language competence (Auroux, 2008: 48-50). Special attention is traditionally paid to the development of reading skills when teaching a foreign language at faculties. Indeed, reading remains the leading receptive types of speech activity in the training of a future professional. The pedagogical potential of reading in a student's foreign language education cannot be overestimated: more than 65% of publications are carried out in English today. The main task of the teacher is to teach students how to extract the necessary information from the text in order to solve specific communicative and professional tasks. To achieve this goal, such types of reading as learning, introductory, viewing and search are used (Levchenko, 2002: 187-200).

Of particular note is such a type of reading as viewing and searching reading from the monitor screen. To develop skills in working with Internet resources, special types of tasks should be created that contribute to the development of the ability to read independently. In connection with the organization of independent work of students, tasks aimed at controlling the understanding of the read text are of particular importance. Examples of such tasks can be exercises for listing the main facts, translating individual parts of the text, searching for semantic correspondences between the content of the text and its short form of presentation, writing a review or annotation to what was read, a short retelling (Nikolayeva, 2003: 49-55).

Listening is deservedly considered one of the most difficult types of receptive speech activity at the faculties of natural sciences. This is due to a number of objective reasons of a phonostylistic nature: oral speech is characterized by redundancy, repetitions, and placeholder words. The use of phonetic phenomena such as weak verb forms, elision, and assimilation in coherent English speech makes it difficult for an unprepared listener to audibly perceive the meaningful side of an utterance, and the speed and emotionality of speech, the presence of several speakers, and background noise cause additional difficulties in perceiving coherent speech. In addition, successful perception of oral speech is associated with personal psychological and physiological characteristics, "the development of speech hearing and memory, the ability to use probabilistic forecasting, the presence of attention and interest", motivation to carry out cognitive activity (Bihych, Borysko, Borets'ka, 2003: 39-91). For successful listening, it is necessary for the listener to have associative connections, the ability to operate both productive and receptive vocabulary, which is acquired mainly in the process of reading.

When teaching listening, it is necessary to take into account the potential vocabulary, that is, lexical units, the meaning of which the trainees can guess. These can be words of foreign origin, complex and derivative words formed with the help of affixes known to the learners, etc. The perception of passive and potential dictionaries depends on the ability to predict and use an instant decision choice from a number of probabilistic hypotheses (Holtgraves, 2003: 91-98). However, even with well-developed grammatical and lexical skills, forecasting skills, students face difficulties in perceiving foreign language speech by ear. There are a number of reasons for this, the most common of which is the difficulty in decoding the audio signal they receive. Decoding refers to the perception of sounds of a foreign language and linking them mentally into words and phrases that students have in their vocabulary.

An effective technique for successful decoding can be bottom-up listening, in which understanding is achieved by dividing and decoding the audio signal in parts. With this type of listening, it becomes possible to divide the speech stream into separate words. One of the most recognized in Western European linguodidactic practice, but rarely used in our country, effective types of work for developing listening skills "from the bottom up" is dictogloss (Rivers, 2001: 164-170). The essence of dictogloss is the reconstruction of the listened text in pairs or groups. During the two- to three-time listening, students write down familiar words and phrases. Then, in groups, they try to reproduce the content of the text as closely as possible to the original, while observing lexico-grammatical and stylistic forms. At the final stage of the dictogloss, the prepared versions of the text are analyzed, and errors are checked at the same time. This type of work allows students to actively use and develop, in addition to listening skills, lexical and grammatical skills, writing and speaking skills (when working in groups), as well as instant note-taking skills. When selecting texts for dictogloss, their communicative and professional orientation, as well as the level of students' language competence, should be taken into account. In addition, dictogloss allows students to show creativity based on the language resources used, independently assess the level of their own linguistic communicative and professional competencies, which creates a situation of success, indirectly forming the student's self-esteem and creating motivation for self-improvement (Rivers, 2001: 178-212).

Another type of listening that is used quite often is top-down listening, in which the development of oral perception skills occurs by applying a variety of landmarks and supports before listening. Such landmarks can be both visual and verbal supports. Verbal visual supports can be keywords and phrases, various headings, a plan, exercises performed before listening. This allows creating the right direction of thought, helps to predict the main content of an oral message. During the listening process, it is also possible to perform various tasks for a more successful perception. Such tasks include: questions on the content of the text; recognition exercises (determining the context, type of text, recognition of individual lexical units); tasks for correlating descriptions with images or diagrams; following instructions (addition, filling in and drawing up various diagrams and diagrams); taking notes (filling out forms, diagrams); interpretation (defining the relationship of the speakers, expressing approval/disapproval of the speakers). The two types of listening described above can be used separately or combined (Bihych, Borysko, Borets'ka, 2003: 178231). The success of learning listening skills will depend on the correct combination and effective use of various techniques characteristic of these types. But whatever the method used at the stage of perception, at the final stage of listening, tasks should be used that contribute to the development of students' creative potential and the development of speaking skills. The listened text is the basis for subsequent discussion, conducting discussions, and role-playing games. In this regard, special attention should be paid to the selection of texts for higher school students of the specialty 014 Secondary education. The main requirements for audio texts should be considered their professional orientation, authenticity and an appropriate level of difficulty.

Concluding remarks

Thus, successful mastery of a foreign language cannot be reduced only to knowledge of a certain number of lexical units and grammatical structures and the ability to understand a text statement addressed to a student. The cognitive aspect of the goals of teaching a foreign language includes the development of the ability to flexibly use information, the ability to correctly interpret it, which provides, in particular, such processes requiring specific knowledge and skills as the elimination of missing information in a statement, the speculation of omissions and the restoration of elliptical structures. In order to master a global semantic project, it is necessary, therefore, a harmonious combination of one's own and foreign-language socio-cultural experience. The socio-cultural aspect is closely related to the linguistic, cognitive and academic.

Further research. The prospect of research is to analyze the ways of formation of lexical and grammatical skills, as well as socio-cultural competence among higher school students of the specialty 014 Secondary education.

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