students’ esp skills quality monitoring on the basis of multimedia course “english” zoya...
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Students’ ESP Skills Quality Students’ ESP Skills Quality Monitoring on the Basis of Monitoring on the Basis of
Multimedia Course “English” Multimedia Course “English”
Zoya Konnova Zoya Konnova Doctorate,
Professor, Director of
Foreign Languages
Department
Tula State University,
92, Lenin av.
Tula, RF
300600
Olga GladkovaOlga GladkovaAssociate Professor,
Foreign Languages
Department
Tula State University,
92, Lenin av.
Tula, RF, 300600
1. Preconditions for the Necessity of 1. Preconditions for the Necessity of Students’ ESP Skills Quality Monitoring Students’ ESP Skills Quality Monitoring
of the “Essentially New Type”of the “Essentially New Type”
The pedagogical term “monitoring” means “diagnostics, assessment and prognostication of pedagogical process condition: tracing the course of pedagogical process, its results and future trends” (Стефановская (1998)).
Nowadays it is impossible to monitor the students’ ESP skills quality in the conditions of a modern university without paying attention to information technologies and to their penetration into the educational process. IT change the educational process qualitatively and, as a result, have an influence on the process of future specialists’ competences formation.
Nowadays modern pedagogical science faces the emergence and formation of the first generation of young people whose growing up and development were accompanied by the active use mobile phones, interactive computer games, Apple iPod, PCs, Internet, etc. To denote such young people a neologism “digital native” was introduced in western pedagogical science.
Young people of this generation are united by the ability to get information from more than one source, to do parallel data processing, to perceive visual-, audio- and video information better than textual information, to communicate distantly in real time mode.
The detected peculiarities of “digital natives” generation influence the traditional methods of knowledge control in the process of foreign language teaching as the majority of the students studying foreign languages today (English in particular) are already the “digital natives”.
This fact dictates the necessity to develop a conceptually new technology of students’ ESP skills quality monitoring, because the traditional methods of control and study progress tracing in accordance with the traditional system of statistical reporting cannot give the rapid and relevant information about language skills of the students who are the “digital natives”.
The modern student prefers vivid, “fresh”, interactive, multimedia information preferably in small portions and in audio-, video of graph formats. It is exactly the intention to satisfy the demands of the new generation of students that makes the theoreticians and practitioners think about the necessity of introducing the electronic controlling and measuring recourses into the educational process.
2. “Electronic Monitoring Advantages2. “Electronic Monitoring Advantages
(!)(!) “Electronic” presentation, processing and storing of controlling and measuring recourses satisfy not only the requirements of education informatization process. The benefit for the teachers and the educational institution itself is also evident.
(!)(!) Html-format allows to introduce the audio-visual method of information presentation; this fact gives the teacher the opportunity to make the process of test preparation and testing easier, reducing the quantity of the instructional technologies in use to only one – a personal computer.
(!) (!) Moreover it is possible to save not only consumables but also teacher’s time spent on test results verification and analyzing; it is also possible to register test results data in a separate file in Department’s info media database.
(!) (!) The concentration of data in one place and in one storage medium helps solve the problem of individual and group diagnostics of the students’ language skills quality more effectively and gives the opportunity to prognosticate students’ language skills development, ways of improvement and further monitoring.
3. Multimedia Course 3. Multimedia Course ““EnglishEnglish””
To ensure the effective monitoring of the students’ ESP skills quality the group of teachers from Foreign Languages Department (Tula State University) together with the specialists from Internet-Institute (Tula State University) designed the multimedia course “English”.
The use of this multimedia course in the system of higher education is rational not only in class work (e.g. for intermediate or final testing), but also for students’ self-instruction and self-control. The multimedia course can also be used for data-in monitoring of students’ language skills quality when organizing the students in mini-groups for training according to the level of language mastering.
Multimedia Course “English” StructureMultimedia Course “English” Structure The multimedia course “English”
(Konnova et all (2010)) consists of 10 Units, which are the combination of teaching materials devoted to all grammar and lexical themes (according to the work program) and organized into one instruction and testing system, which is very simple to use.
The main page contains the MENU with The main page contains the MENU with the control buttons:the control buttons:
Work ProgramWork Program (work program for the discipline “English” for Bachelors-non-
linguists);
Course BookCourse Book (10 interactive lexico-grammatic units);
MaximizerMaximizer (testing simulator with the possibility of statistical data obtaining in current
monitoring; used for grammar and lexical training and monitoring with the help of multiple-choice
tests);
AudioAudio (audio testing simulator with the possibility of statistical data obtaining in current
monitoring; used for audio skills training and monitoring when listening to monologues and
dialogues);
VideoVideo (video testing simulator with the possibility of statistical data obtaining in current
monitoring; used for audio-visual perception training and monitoring and learning about life
abroad);
NavigatorNavigator (button necessary for contextual search for the required information without step-by-step going through the multimedia course and for optimally quick search for the required test).
The consecutive doing of all the exercises leads not only to getting the statistical data about test results, but also allows to diagnose the students’ ESP skills level.
The multimedia course goes together with a supplementary disk containing tests for
monitoring and control only.
4. Monitoring on the Basis of 4. Monitoring on the Basis of Multimedia Course “English”Multimedia Course “English”
Students’ ESP skills quality needs to be systematically traced in order to step-by-step solve educational problems, define and get rid of the gaps in the learned material, adjust the educational process and prognosticate its content and technologies.
In students’ ESP skills quality monitoring it is possible to indicate the definite patterns of teachers and students’ activity. The analysis of the mentioned patterns gives the opportunity to develop the strategy for the further actions. This helps to percept the student not only as an object of the educational process, but also as a subject of educational process organization.
In the frames of students’ ESP skills quality monitoring at Foreign Languages Department (Tula State University) the resources of the multimedia course “English” are used:• to define listening skills indicator;• to define reading skills indicator;• to define grammar skills indicator;• to define the indicator of professional terms skills and contextual professionally-oriented vocabulary skills.
The indicators for the components of students’ ESP skills are calculated according to the method of V.P. Bespalko’s knowledge diagnostics. The analysis of the results includes each stage indicators comparison, in, through and out indicators juxtaposition. The type of students’ progress or regress is registered. Monitoring results are automatically stored in a separate file within the info media database thereby providing the visualized data on each student and on the group of students as a whole.
Students’ ESP skills quality diagnostics includes two stages:• diagnostics of skills quality initial
condition; • diagnostics of skills quality after taking
improving measures.
In our experimental work as the language skills indicators we choose a coefficient of the indicators under analysis of the students who were trained according to the traditional methods of language education and exited Foreign Languages Department in 2007 and a coefficient of the indicators under analysis of the students who were trained on the basis of multimedia course “English’ and exited Foreign Languages Department in 2009.
The coefficient of the ESP skills indicators under analysis is calculated according to the formula:
K = N / M (V.P. Bespalko’s knowledge diagnostics), where:
K – a coefficient of the indicator under analysis;
N – a number of performed operations;
M – a total number of operations.
In our research we choose 0,7 as a critical value of a coefficient of the indicator under analysis. If the coefficient is less than 0,7, the student’s skills are insufficient. If the coefficient is about 0,9-1, it means that the student’s skills are sufficient and he/she can move to the next stage of education.
The results which we got in the beginning of our experimental work are contained in the
Table 1.Table 1. Students’ ESP skills indicators in the beginning of the Table 1. Students’ ESP skills indicators in the beginning of the
experimental work (2007) experimental work (2007)
Together with the students’ ESP skills quality monitoring we carried out complex work directed to non-stop detection of the causes of insufficient ESP skills quality. We also conducted discussions and forums dedicated to the timely ESP skills quality correction. The described measures were also accompanied by the continuous modernization of the test bank.
In the course of our research the groups of students taking part in the experiment were trained on the basis of multimedia course “English” in the frames of Department’s info media. At the end of our experimental work we got the results proving the improvement of the indicators under analysis (Table 2).
Table 2. Students’ ESP skills indicators improvement
The coefficients of listening skills, reading skills, grammar skills, professional terms skills and contextual professionally-oriented vocabulary skills increased to the approximate value of 0,7. This fact proves the sufficient level of students’ ESP skills quality according to the selected indicators. The increase in students’ progress was detected.
5. Conclusion5. Conclusion
Thus, on the current stage of our work we truly hope, that the multimedia course “English” will favour the education effectiveness increase and will become an irreplaceable instrument of future specialists’ ESP skills quality monitoring in the conditions of higher education informatization.
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