DEVELOPING A MODEL FOR TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADUATES’ SELF-LEARNING WITH THE HELP OF PROFESSION-ORIENTED BLOGGING

As the number of teaching hours allocated to language learning in technical universities is being reduced, there is a need for a more efficient use of time spent by students on independent work. This paper states that the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), especially of blogs which have an educational potential in terms of organizing independent work of students, is underestimated in research and educational literature. The purpose of the article is to present and describe a pedagogical model for organizing independent self-learning work of technical university undergraduates, which is based on their profession-oriented blogging in English. The paper gives a brief description of the model and the approaches used to implement it. It also indicates the criteria developed specifically for evaluating students‟ blogs. The model was tested in Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University as a part of teaching experiment. The experiment results demonstrate a high level of the students‟ professional language competence which confirms the effectiveness of the presented model. Moreover, it has been proven that students can keep blogs independently, without teachers‟ guidance; as they are well familiar with the general rules of creating web pages in social networks and can easily start a professionoriented blog in English.