EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ELEMENTS AND STUDENTS' REFLEXIVE PRACTICES IN THE PROCESS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING
Authors:   Tomsk State University, NAGEL O.V. , KOZLOVSKAYA E.V. ,   Tomsk State University
Published: December 2024

The concept of educational environment as a tool that activates learners' intellectual, social and emotional mechanisms is presented. This study focuses on language education and metacognitive orientation of artificially created language environment characteristics since it is relevant to operationalize the evaluation of educational environment elements for their potential connection with learners' metacognitive competences. In addition to social and subject-spatial components of the educational environment the article considers types of speech activity as environmental context which are able to influence the level of students' agency and learning activities engagement by certain accompanying tools. On the example of data received from the pilot study “Metacognitive Approach to Designing Educational Environment for Foreign Language Learning: Individual Experience, Strategies and Academic Achievements” supported by the Tomsk State University Development Programme (Priority-2030) it is proposed to evaluate the features of students' reflective practices in the process of developing skills in four types of speech activity when learning foreign languages and to correlate this level with tasks characteristics presented in the proposed student's book. The study uses the descriptive method to identify the degree of focus on students' metacognitive strategies in the textbook tasks that activate agency, as well as the questionnaire method aimed at finding out the level of students' reflective practices in the process of developing their skills in four types of speech activity while learning foreign languages. According to the hypothesis, the textbook tasks aimed at development in four types of speech activity should stimulate students for self-regulated learning and equip students with strategic knowledge on effective learning strategies. The analysis was carried out taking into account the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the tasks for the formation and development of skills in all types of speech activity with a focus on metacognitive strategies, along with the presence of mental activity target verbs oriented to understanding, planning and decision-making processes. To test the hypothesis, the characteristics of the textbook tasks were correlated with the results of a survey using a battery of questionnaires aimed at assessing various aspects of metacognitive strategizing across speech activities. The target questionnaire was designed in such a way that for each type of speech activity there are several blocks of questions: understanding of the essence of the process and consideration of the specifics of each speech activity, the student's emotional involvement and self-reflection. The conducted analysis of the survey results on students' use of metacognitive strategies in the context of different types of foreign language speech activity and correlation of the data obtained as a result of quantitative and qualitative analysis of tasks through the prism of their metacognitive potential can be regarded as a source of data for selecting a prospective focus of methodological work on designing an educational environment aimed at metacognitive strategies development. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.