Communicative and connective integration of social networking sites as a tool for development of undergraduate students' written conversational skills in a foreign language
Authors:   Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod, Glumova Elena P. , Panchenko Yuri Yu. ,   Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod
Published: February 2023

Currently, virtual communication on SNS is becoming an integral part of students' everyday and professional communication. Such communication mainly takes place in written form and, having a number of linguistic and discursive features, is an independent form of the functioning of a foreign language - foreign language written dialogic speech. The aim of this study is to consider the possibility of communicative and connective integration of social networks into the teaching of a foreign language for the development of undergraduate students' written conversational skills in a foreign language (in the case of English). We have formulated two main groups of skills that make up the speech component of foreign language communicative competence in the written dialogic speech: pragmatic and discursive skills. Pragmatic skills are associated with the need to convey pragmatic information: intonation and the emotional background of the message in the absence of direct eye contact between the interlocutors. Discursive skills are associated with the need to build a dialogue in such a way that, in the absence of direct eye contact, the interlocutor can unambiguously interpret the received message and continue communication. To develop effective technologies for the development of the listed groups of speech skills, we made an attempt to comprehend the implementation of a communicative approach to the introduction of social networks in the educational process, taking into account the principles of the connective paradigm of digital pedagogy. A communicative approach to the integration of social networks is implemented in the case of creating a series of network events in a social network. Connectiv-ism, on the other hand, implies such an organization of a network event that provokes a conversation between students in the comments under the published content in a foreign language. As an example of a technology that takes into account the communicative-connective approach to the integration of social networks in the teaching of a foreign language, we have proposed the technology of network communicative project activities, and also formulated a mechanism for its implementation in the VKontakte social network. This technology assumes the obligatory presence of two stages: constructive and communicative, corresponding to the principles of the communicative-connective approach. At the constructive stage, students are invited to publish foreign-language content on a social network in accordance with a specific communicative task, due to which a series of network events is created in the social network. At the communicative stage, students comment on each other's publications, engaging in written dialogic communication in a foreign language. As a result of the network communication of students as part of the work on the project task, a volume of correspondence in a foreign language is created in the social network, which can be analyzed in accordance with the criteria for the measurement of the level of the written conversational skills in a foreign language.