Anna Rubtsova

Aim.  To examine metacognitive strategies for teaching students digital reading in English. Methodology.  The materials presented in scientific articles of electronic databases have become the material for analyzing the theoretical aspects of the problem under study. The main methods used in the study were methods of analyzing literary sources, systematization and generalization of the theoretical and practical results obtained. Results.  The results of the study make it possible to classify the main metacognitive strategies for teaching digital reading in a foreign language in the field of education. The article systematizes strategies for interacting with the text, including previewing, forecasting, critical evaluation and selective reading, as well as methods of working with unfamiliar vocabulary. The importance of considering the individual characteristics of students, such as the level of language proficiency and experience working with digital resources, is emphasized. It is concluded that it is necessary to develop new teaching methods that combine various strategies to improve the effectiveness of digital reading. Research implications.  The theoretical significance of the research lies in the structuring and scientific substantiation of the system of metacognitive strategies of digital reading, which expands the theoretical understanding of cognitive processes in the framework of foreign language education in the era of digitalization. The practical value of the research lies in the possibility of applying its results to improve curricula and methods aimed at developing critical thinking and competence in working with foreign-language digital resources. Conclusions.  The research was aimed at considering metacognitive strategies for teaching students digital reading in English. As part of the work, the tasks set were solved: the features of digital text that affect the reading process were analyzed, and a system of metacognitive strategies adapted to work in a digital environment was developed.

Cultural diffusion and a paradigm shift from a “skill-based” approach to an “action-oriented” approach in language pedagogy transform the functions of an educator in a foreign language classroom. A language instructor accepts an intermediatory role in learners’ interactions with the environment, using language as a primary mediation tool. Thus, by being involved in varied social contexts and activities, a language educator mediates learning, communication, and sociocultural environments. This study relies on a structural analysis to investigate the mediating role of a language educator. It suggests that pedagogic mediation should be viewed as a specific form of language educators’ activity and described through three dimensions: mediating learning, mediating communication, and mediating sociocultural space. In the teaching and learning context, these dimensions manifest themselves as skills to adapt to the instructional and linguistic complexity of texts, manage interaction, facilitate communication in sensitive situations, etc. Drawing upon a phenomenological research design and qualitative methods, the study develops illustrative descriptors that can be used in a foreign language classroom to assess the patterns of social, instructional, and communicative behavior of educators. The developed descriptors allowed for exploring the self-perceptions of pre-service language teachers towards their abilities for pedagogic mediation in a foreign language classroom. The results of the study identified the learning gaps among novice language teachers that can be further addressed as learning objectives while designing a curriculum for professional training in language education.

Nowadays the study of language interaction within the discursive paradigm is gaining increasing popularity. Thus, a description of such types of discourse as political, media, advertising, etc. has been widely developed. A special area of research is devoted to works on the characteristics of academic discourse (including the foreign one) due to the fact that the processes of globalization, academic mobility of professors and students determine the increasing role of academic language as a means of accumulating and transmitting scientific experience. The article provides a linguodidactic characteristic of academic discourse. The aim of this study is to determine the degree of formation of mediation skills in postgraduate students of a multidisciplinary university while working with general scientific texts. The study was conducted at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in 2023. The participants of the study were students in non-linguistic areas of training, N=67, with a language proficiency level of B2+ on the CEFR scale. To reach the aim, a test of 9 tasks was compiled. The tasks were developed based on the indicators of mediative competence presented in the CEFR for level B2 and included 6 general scientific texts in English on various topics (“Bird Migration”, “Petroleum Resources”, “Crows Count on ’Number Neurons’”, “Radon”, “Cave Art in Europe”, “Minerals and Plants”). The results of the study showed that only 10% of postgraduate students successfully completed all tasks. Students demonstrated the ability to summarize and convey significant information in a foreign language, structure text fragments, adapt and simplify source material, express their own point of view regarding what they read, and provide a high-quality translation without distorting the meaning of the source text. The majority of students – 60% – do not have the skills of mediating general scientific texts to a degree corresponding to their level of language proficiency. The key difficulties that students faced were related to the interpretation and generalization of semantic dominants of the source text (in particular those with metaphorical meaning) as well as to the correct lexical building of statements (the search for lexical substitutions and equivalents during translation) and to the analysis of the logical and structural organization of general scientific texts. This allows concluding that the formation of mediation skills should be of an intentional nature. Moreover, it should be based on a systematic and methodologically appropriate model of teaching foreign language academic discourse.