No 4 (2015)

This work evaluates the role of specially-organized independent work of high school students in the formation of cognitive, search-and-creative, educational-and-professional, and organizational activity from the perspective of subject-activity approach. The results of the research work lead to the conclusion that the introduction of productive-and-creative independent work of the high school students result in the formation of students’ individual activity through implementation of self-educational complex that includes basic forms of self-education.

The research determines the integrative nature of environmental issues caused by the human activity, and, on this basis, the efficiency of integrative approaches to the ecological issues solution is proved. The authors proved the appropriateness of the integrative approach to the formation and development of ecological culture of the higher education institution students as the approach of methodology of scientific knowledge and practice and showed the interrelation of the information and technological and socio-cultural competences of a university graduate with his ecological and technological culture, which includes the integration of ecological and technological components of general professional competence of a specialist’s personality. The authors noted the feasibility of the higher education institution students’ socialization through the formation and development of technological, ecological, information and economic culture. The paper describes the experience on the formation and development of ecological and technological culture of students within the holistic (integrative) information and education environment (HIEE) at the faculty of mathematics, physics and informatics in Samara State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities. The authors give their definition for the holistic information and education environment (HIEE) and explain its role in the improvement of the efficiency of the educational process and the level of quality of training specialists through the synergetic effect and high degree of emergence. The authors expect and prove the key role of integrative approach to the effective formation and development of ecological and technological culture of students within the environment of high-technology HIEE of a higher education institution.

Basing on special aspects of training and professional activity of Masters of pedagogical education, and the requirements to the results of their acquisition of major educational programs and their structure containing in the Federal State Education Standard of Higher Education (FSES HE), the authors prove the necessity to integrate mathematical methods and computer-based simulation methods into the content of training masters-teachers within the  modern information and educational environment (IEE) of a university. In addition, the authors highlight the fact that modern IEE of a university causes the necessity to intensify the application of these methods by the future masters in their scientific studies while preparing graduate qualification works (GQW) in the form of master’s thesis (MT). The paper shows the results of analysis of MTs on pedagogics and psychology displaying that the abovementioned methods play the role of a tool or just a mean to prove the hypothesis of the study, and the logical structure of classification of mistakes made by graduate students-researchers in their MGQWs in the form of MTs on pedagogics. The authors analyze the known in education methodology approaches of future graduate students-teachers to the organization of their researches and offer algorithm of pedagogical study within the framework of MGQW in the form of MT. To improve the efficiency and quality of training masters-teachers, the authors recommend using the training course “Mathematical methods and computer-based simulation methods in education” and present its program.  

Market economy formation and globalization became one of the main factors that develop competitive advantages of companies with different levels of development. For each of them, the image became a compulsory element of successful business in the market environment, and opportunities for its formation and maintaining at a high level are target indicators of strategic development. The right image is the key to successful commercial, public and other activities based on communicative interaction with society or its individual groups. Deliberate formation of the image is an open and important issue for many modern companies, public personalities and organizers of public events. Nowadays the image is one of communication means representing the most effective generalized type of informational message that is implemented in the context of information or time deficiency. In this case, an advertising interview is the form of communication that allows conveying the most important thing to all people concerned. Advertising interviews are usually arranged in the form of a dialogue, but also like other genres of PR-communication have their own structure.

Because of the English language globalization in Russia there is a need to study the characteristics of advertising interviews in English, and the implementation of practical skills of English communication in all spheres of activity: industrial, construction, educational, scientific, social, etc. The manager must have special language competencies which help to achieve prime targets in short conversations, enabling to improve the image of an individual person or a company.

This paper considers main peculiarities of image forming in advertising interviews in English, describes the main stages of advertising interview conduction and stage-by-stage technologies of image formation. To form the peculiarities of interviewing in English, modular technologies are used, where the module means a portion of certain information and technology of its development. The choice of modular technology in education is justified by its simplicity and the availability of feedback from learners, as well as the presence of learning objectives and assessment criteria of their achievement.

The paper describes the role of globalization processes in the modern education. The authors think that the comprehension of both negative and positive aspects of the process depends on the appropriately highlighted key points in the understanding of this phenomenon essence. In the paper, the authors highlight the significance of understanding and quality assessment of that penetration extent when the globalization acts as the creative activity and promotes education optimization and note the fact that education becomes polyfunctional and its objective is to form a person keeping its personal identity and having global sense of the world processes. The solution of challenge characterized by the society facing the difficulties of globalized world is possible under the conditions of transfer from economic and institutional modernization to the social and cultural modernization. The goals of a new stage of the education modernization is the ensuring of positive socialization and educational successfulness of each student, the increasing participation of education in the innovative development of Russia and the response to challenges of changed cultural and social environment. Meanwhile, it is noted that not each country attempts to take active position in education modernization / transformation in the context of globalization processes. The authors suppose that in future, the educational system characterized by the multidimensionality and the integrity should be created taking into account the different states positions and the changes on the institutional and personal levels. An active part in development of this system should be assigned to teachers having system understanding of innovative processes, education development tendencies, able to use the criteria and methods of assessment of education development efficiency, and understanding the mechanisms of control of innovations in education.      

In the paper, the authors both consider the main CLIL-technology instruments and present various models and technologies with their individual long-term (global) goals. The authors also show the step-by-step process of designing of CLIL-studies by creating a planning map, a “checklist”, give the examples of how to choose the discipline content, and make the conclusion that these tools can be adapted, reorganized and changed according to various priorities of this or that content as it is not a fixed formula. The authors highlighted the importance of foreign language communication between a teacher and the students in the process of a new subject learning and the thesaurus formation. It causes the development of a person cultural potential on the basis of new knowledge and skills.

The conclusions are based on the materials learned by authors during their work experience abroad.

The paper studies the projecting activity as a means to implement research work and a way of civil and patriotic education of undergraduate students within subjects of the social and humanitarian cycle. Certain types of professional activity are defined by a higher educational institution together with the students, scientific and pedagogical staff of the higher educational institution and association of employers. At the initial stage of training the main academic load lays down on the subjects of the social and humanitarian cycle: history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology and pedagogy. The main requirement of modern education is a competence-based approach that causes use of interactive forms and methods of training, and much attention should be paid to research work of students as a form of not only classroom, but also independent work. Research activity is implemented both in educational, and in extracurricular projecting activity of students. Classroom research activity implies writing library-research papers or doing projects, studying the sources and works that have research character. In extra-curricular time the research work is organized individually with students or groups of students through work of scientific study groups, seminars and various scientific conferences, participation of students in round tables, quizzes, contests and excursions. The important principle of complex system of research and scientific work of students should be the continuity in its methods and forms from subject to subject, from one training course to another, from one type of studies and tasks to another. Scientific work in a higher education institution promotes continuous improvement of teaching and educational process, introduction of modern techniques and pedagogical technologies in educational activity. Formation of civil and patriotic consciousness of undergraduate students is an important component of modern education because from the use of the youth potential and its civic position, the development of the country and its future depends. The result of projecting activity of teachers of the “Humanities” chair of NNSEEU is presented in this work.

This work analyzes the main approaches and specific features of the multilingual training implementation, reveals the basic directions for professional training of students – future teachers, as well as training and retraining of working teachers in the implementation of multilingual model in multicultural education. An important place is given to the preparation of teachers for successful adaptation of the multilingual model of multicultural education to the national conditions of the region and to its further improvement.

Implementation of the multilingual model of multicultural education in the region has specific national requirements to the level of psychological, communicative, ethno-cultural, professional, educational, informative, behavioral, social and legal competencies of teachers at educational institutions. In this regard, formation of teachers’ readiness to implement multilingual model of multicultural education at all levels – professional, psycho-pedagogical, personal, motivational, and technological – is one of the main conditions for its application in a wide range of educational activity at a regional educational institution.

The paper covers the issue of the increase of language competence level of the university students. In particular, the author considers the issue of text research competence formation and, on the basis of analysis of quality of scientific paper abstracts writing, makes an attempt to define the level of text research competence of modern authors. The author makes the conclusion on the necessity to increase the level of language and research training of the students – future authors, as well as suggests the alternate solutions of this issue. 

The paper reveals the essence of the concept “psychological and pedagogical support”, studies the specific character of football as a sports activity. It is sated that building a foundation for general and special training as well as making up of footballer personality takes place at young age. The research proves that the basis for achieving a high level of preparedness of a sportsman is a thoroughly planned and well-organized training process combined with a professional psychological and pedagogical support. The work emphasizes the leading role of both coach and sports psychologist unanimity in implementation of the program of psychological support provided for the sportsmen; underlines the importance of personal motivation and motivation on the part of the coach and the team, as well as the importance of mastering the techniques of psychic self-regulation. All these will considerably facilitate independent achievement of the best results in maintaining individual psychophysical state and help to create a favorable psychological climate in the team.

The paper considers the requirements to the regional component of professional standard of a modern foreign language teacher: subject, general pedagogical and professional competences improving learning motivation and forming the students’ willingness to perform intercultural verbal communication to reach mutual understanding.   

Nowadays new information technologies are extensively introduces into educational process. This tendency is accompanied by the implementation of new concepts and new English and Russian terms into a scientific-methodological practice. Such a rapid flow of new information and new terminology causes considerable difficulties in their understanding and adequate usage by foreign language teachers, and first of all, by the teachers of English, as there is no information-technological component and, as a consequence, there are no special dictionaries. This situation requires the creation of the appropriate learner’s dictionary of the English-Russian terminology in computer linguodidactics which could be used as a specific tool in formation of the professional competence of the contemporary English language teacher. To create such a dictionary, the author of the work suggests generating a database as a convenient form of working with terminology that will enable to work faster with the material, be easy to correct and make necessary amendments. The given terminological database is bilingual (English and Russian) and consists of five topical fields. Each topical field has its own name and includes terminology of a specific scope.

The paper considers English poetry as a potential source of building the students’ foreign cultural awareness. To improve the efficiency of the educational process, the author suggests using a special technology which allows revealing of educational (cognitive, developmental and teaching) potential of the foreign-language poetry. Particular attention is paid to determining principles and criteria for the selection of poetry. The most important is the principle of educational value, when poetry is regarded as a fact of foreign culture and is studied in four aspects: cognitive, developmental, teaching and educational. This approach is based on the provisions of the concept of communicative foreign language education. A few criteria are considered: the criterion of cognitive, developmental and educational potential of poetry; the criterion of the feasibility for the selected material to be studied in the given period of time; the criterion of integration of a poetic work into the entire educational process.

The approved standards of the state documents require modernization of the system of continuous education of the Russian Federation on the ground of competence-based approach. The state educational standards on each discipline of curricula of the universities provide a list of competences that the students should gain in the course of study. However, the problem is that this discrete process of the competences formation is not followed by their integration. The students have to be responsible for achievement of integrity of autonomous competences in the form of integrated competencies, and they are not prepared for that.

The analysis of researches and publications, which studied the aspects of this problem and which the author accepts as the ground, shows that the problem should be solved in such a way that the process of autonomous formation of individual competences of students has to be supported by pedagogically managed integration, and attainment of their integrity. One of such integral units studied by many researchers is the socio-cultural competence which represents integrative set of social and cultural competences. However, the unsolved part of the problem under discussion is design of the process of formation of socio-cultural competency of students in the form of pedagogical system with inherent structural components: purpose, contents, methods, features of activity of teachers and students.

The purpose of this work is in justification of the structure and maintenance of system of formation of socio-cultural competence of undergraduate students on the example of training specialists in historical and cultural tourism. The following ideas are used as a foundation for reaching this purpose and gaining the objectives:

- continuity, phasing, and-to-end nature of the process of integral competence formation;

- use of potential opportunities of all disciplines of the curriculum in competence formation;

- distinguishing the priority of the formed component of socio-cultural competence at each stage;

- introduction into the program of the course "Creative self-development of socio-cultural competence of students" and the program of advanced training course for university teachers on formation of socio-cultural competency of students.

Socio-economic problems of reforms in Russia have caused a need for better training of undergraduates through updating higher education technologies and changing outdated forms of training into advanced technologies and models. The increasing need for specialists with professional foreign-language communicative competence makes the subject "Foreign Language" one of the main ones in the formation of professional mobility. The use of modular object-oriented dynamic learning platform Moodle allows improving the efficiency of the process of teaching foreign language to students of non-linguistic specialities within the limited amount of classroom time. This platform provides broad opportunities for communication and interaction between teachers and students for the mutual solution of tasks and problems, creates conditions for organization of active training based on personal characteristics of each student, and gives an opportunity to implement the content of education by providing students with an extensive educational and methodological resource base.

The research presents the results of practical use of Moodle in the process of teaching foreign languages to students of non-linguistic specialities at Minin State Pedagogical University of Nizhny Novgorod. The e-learning methodological complexes are developed according to the requirements of Federal State Educational Standards of Higher Education for implementation of the communicative, personality-oriented and competence-based approaches and reflect the requirements of the score-rating system. The paper also reveals the advantages of distance learning with use of computer technology.

The paper considers the motivation of 8 – 11 grades students to healthy lifestyle and namely to physical culture. The author gives classification of the students’ motivation to physical training and defines factors reducing motivation. The paper presents the motivation complex consisting of the interaction of inner motivation, external positive motivation, external negative motivation and motivation concerned with prospects, and methods and techniques developed for each type of motivation: the expansion of program material, the lesson structure change, the introduction of theoretical lesson of physical culture, the use of measurements for minimization of factors reducing motivation, keeping of self-monitoring diary, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). The author gives the results of the study of motivation complex efficiency while forming healthy lifestyle.  

The paper presents the phenomenon of “bilingualism” and considers the basic forms of bilingual education. The author considers the psychological and pedagogical features of the phenomenon of bilingualism, which include the study of pedagogical and psychological mechanisms of speech functioning. The paper presents several suggestions concerning the application of various methods and approaches in teaching bilinguals to solve psychological and pedagogical problems arising while training students-bilinguals.

The authors consider the relevance of development of verbal competences of technical high school graduates in the process of their vocational training. The necessity of development of vocational oral communication in the process of training future engineers is caused by the fact that technical education has some key differences from humanitarian one. It occurs due to the prevalence of disciplines based on the exact sciences and more clearly structured organization of training. Verbal competences are mainly developed within the general disciplines of the humanities and natural sciences, which are studied at the beginning of training. While teaching vocational disciplines to the upper years’ students, the priority goal is to develop vocational competences. It leads to inadequate development of knowledge and skills in the field of oral communication. It creates the necessity to develop verbal competences of the technical high school students during the process of learning general and specialty disciplines, which should harmonize with the main goals, take into account the prospects of development of higher technical education at the stage of development of a new educational conception. It is shown that the future engineer training requires the development of verbal competences of the students in technical high school: the ability to reflect, to understand, to analyze, to control, and to generalize the information; to get new knowledge and to manage own verbal and cogitative process. The task of development of verbal competences of future engineers causes the necessity to develop the theory and methodology of the system of the students’ oral culture development in the process of learning general and specialty disciplines. It requires the design and development of new educational technologies involving additional forms and methods for laboratory work, business games, seminars, writing of self-dependent tasks in the form of essay, explanatory notes and so on.      

The authors consider some approaches to the solution of Boolean functions differential equations using certain examples. The goal of the research is to represent complex questions through the elementary examples.

The authors give the examples of solution of differential equations in partial derivatives. The paper will be useful to people who starts studying this issue.

Environmental education and upbringing in higher education is a constituent part of the entire environmental education system. At the same time, formation of ecological self-awareness among the university students has not been the subject of special psychological and pedagogical study. Ecological self-awareness is a necessary condition and management component of any conscious human activity. It has the same structure as individual self-consciousness. However, it contains a qualitatively new content which is aimed at the establishment, regulation and support of the bond between “I” and “the environment”. Based on generalized definition of the “ecological self-awareness” concepts represented in the scientific literature the authors have given their own interpretation. Formation of ecological self-awareness at young age is directly associated with environmental education and the process of vocational training. The research substantiates the concept of building the educational process content at a university aimed at establishment and consolidation of a system of ecological value orientations of university students. Conceptual grounds for value determination of students’ ecological self-awareness are developed on the methodological, theoretical and technological levels.

The paper proceeds theoretical analysis of current status of the problem of choice in psychology. The goal of research is to compare psychological mechanisms and predictors of choice in the situations of various significance.

The author first considers and analyzes in details the phenomenon of subjective choice formation in the situation of buying goods (good as a symbol) and its components, as well as their relation to the individual peculiarities of personality.   

The obtained results display fundamental differences in the process characteristics of choice of the goods of various significance, uncertainty, novelty and complexity.   

The paper describes the concept of “strategic competence” as one of the most important structural elements of the foreign language communicative competence. The author considers the formation of strategic competence in students of nonlinguistic professions on the example of speaking aspect training. It is suggested to use active methods of training to form strategic competence in students of nonlinguistic specialties.

For successful implementation of the educational cognitive activity, a student has to possess a number of competences that includes, in particular, the ability to master new knowledge independently. Readiness for independent work is one of the most important conditions for successful educational activity. These circumstances lead to the conclusion that today the problem of formation of the students’ motivation to independent work is especially acute. The training as the presentation of system of knowledge transforms into the necessity of development of skills for the independent educational cognitive activity of the students.

Starting education in a higher education institution, a former school student deals with a number of new circumstances: sharp decrease of the level of external control over his independent activity, change of the educational activity structure (the specificity of educational process is that the in-class learning takes about a half of study time, and the students have to master a large part of learning material independently).

The ability to work independently helps students to develop mental set for independent systematic knowledge acquisition and the development of abilities to use scientific and public information while solving new cognitive tasks. The development of these abilities is promoted by the activation of the students’ independent work when they solve creative tasks useful for their future profession both individually and in-group.

The modernization of the Russian education provides the increase in amount of independent work and the strengthening of its role. Students have to form the appropriate competences, first during the extra-curricular individual work and to seize bases of the systematized knowledge.

Higher educational institutions use in their activity a variety of resources and, obviously, are obliged to create all possible conditions for formation and consolidation of knowledge. Research and teaching staff play a major role in improvement of training quality of future specialists. Nowadays, special importance is given to improving the training of graduate students and creating a system of competencies associated with the successful performing of their future professional activity. For institutions of higher education it is essential to have timely and targeted support of a high level quality of educational services.

The main goal of the research is to study the theoretical and methodological approaches to the construction of educational system in order to improve the quality of training graduate students in economics, including setting objectives for the development of this system and the defining the main principles used for implementation of the educational process and teaching methods.

The paper identified the major stages of the educational system implementation to improve the training quality of graduate students in economics. They are the following: organizational, diagnostic, technological, control and efficiency, and criterion-level stage.

Interpersonal communication is one of the most important issues of research in psychology. Without effective communication at certain stages of development, a person cannot obtain the necessary knowledge, experience and skills for effective interaction in society. However, parents and teachers underestimate influence of effective interpersonal communication in most parts of the youth life. Lack of immediate communication between young people is one of the reasons that cause deviant behavior including various addictions. The paper introduces the concept of interpersonal communication; analyses its characteristics regarding the students who have different internet addiction behavior types; describes adolescent communication problems. The results of the research (n=98) reveal the fact that communication of 28.6 % high school students aged between 15 and 17 is unsuccessful with reference to such personality problems as low communicativeness, shyness, detachment, anxiety, autistic characteristics and vulnerability. The research reveals correlation between successful communication and internet addiction behavior of young people who have no communication skills needed for free and effective communication and social adaptation – ability to approach and dialogue; ease and confidence in communication; spontaneity; ability to influence and persuade.

The paper emphasizes the importance of personality development of both students and teachers in the context of formation of a new educational concept affecting contemporary vision of the educational process and organization of interaction within the learning environment. Transactional analysis model developed by E. Berne is used as the basis for status and role approach which is considered by the author as a factor of students’ communicative competence development. The work reveals the meaning of the three inner elements of the “I” (state of a Parent, a Child, and an Adult) within the personality structure. The author underlines the importance of activization and strengthening of the Adult state as it facilitates a meaningful dialogue between the parties in terms of equal partnership, cooperation, and creative potential development.