Students' self-reporting as a means of determining the essential components of educating English environment

The article discusses the nature and significance of an artificial foreign language environment in the process of learning a foreign language through the prism of reflection of students of specialized linguistic education. A foreign language environment is considered a source of excessive language input, which determines the result of administered foreign language teaching during a rigid number of classroom hours planned in the curricula of linguistic programmes. Data collection protocol, developed by the authors, includes the methodological principles of sociolinguistic questioning and reflects the current trends of complementary variation of online and offline sources of authentic foreign language material. This protocol has been developed with the aim to collect the data on the results of students' reflection on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the foreign language environment. The environment is believed to contribute to the development of all types of foreign language speech activity (speaking, reading, listening and writing). The results of the sociolinguistic survey revealed the multilingual context of the social life of modern students, who note up to 4 significant foreign languages in their environment with the natural dominance of Russian as a mother tongue. In the process of developing diagnostic tools for parameterizing the foreign language environment of a student of a linguistic profile, defined as functional bilingual, the authors actively involved the participants in the experimental study. They were asked to compile a list of resources that contribute to the formation of the external and internal contours of the foreign language environment in the Russian-language continuum. As a result of surveys preceding the study, an online language diary was created. Its objective is to collect data on on the time of student engagement in 4 types of speech activity both in a traditional format and using resources such as social networks (TikTok, Clubhouse, Instagram etc.), podcasts, online video conversations Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, reading blogs (for example Yandex Zen), and computer games. The results of the analysis of students' activities according to the data collected from language diaries (each student filled in one diary per week during 11 weeks) revealed the overall quantitative predominance of extracurricular activities within the artificial foreign language environment. The reading was the predominant activity in the framework of extracurricular activities in comparison with the clear predominance of speaking within the scope of classroom activities. Music (listening to music/singing in English) occupies one of the leading positions, leaving behind the recently popular social networks (TikTok, Clubhouse, Instagram and others).

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