Picularities of training multilingual teachers in the digitalization era

The article defines the need for multilingual training of future teachers of several foreign languages using multilingual digital technologies. The authors assume that a linguistteacher of the digital age is a qualitatively new specialist in the era of linguistic pluralism and cultural polyphony, who should be able to competently combine multilingual pedagogical technologies with multilingual information and communication technologies. The training of these specialists in Russian universities is becoming a paramount task and goal of the third-millennium educational system. An analysis of studies devoted to the development of new pedagogical functions and forecasting of “pedagogical professions of the future” is provided, during which promising areas of competencies in education are identified, such as the use of digital tools (training with the use of IT, online courses, interactive simulators and training aids, game virtual worlds, etc.); the influence of technologies on the individualization and personalization of learning, when the educational process with the use of new technologies is easily adapted to the needs of a particular student and his/her personal traits. The authors argue that distance schools and universities are becoming an equal alternative to traditional fulltime education, and “e-tutors” supervise the educational process and help students master the training program; new teaching professions that are in demand in the digital community are emerging; there is a need for the formation of relevant competencies. In this regard, the authors describe the experience of teaching several foreign languages to future teachers in the digital post-coronavirus era, implemented in the framework of blended education based on electronic multilingual resources. The study carried out by the authors involved undergraduate students in the field of study “Pedagogical Education”, who will become teachers with knowledge of two foreign languages (English and German) after completing the training program. Control and experimental groups were organized from the above students. Lessons in the control group were given in a traditional form of isolated teaching of each separate foreign language. Foreign language lessons in the experimental group were given in such a way that students could develop communication skills in the main activities of both target languages, switching between them at the teacher's request or based on the proposed language situation. As an auxiliary tool, future teachers used multilingual platforms to facilitate the assimilation and development of the studied lexical material. This article highlights the results of the experimental training and proposes an analysis of the educational platforms Quizlet and Vocabulary.com, which favor the formation of multilingual communicative competence in students. The advantages of using multilingual dictionaries in the process of mastering foreign language vocabulary are determined. The authors provide the analysis of multilingual online resources that can satisfy the requests of a wide variety of users representing rare foreign languages, such as Amharic, Burmese, Wolof, etc., as well as extinct languages that are offered for study in universities - Gothic, Latin and Sanskrit. The operational aspects are defined, which are used to practice multilingual vocabulary on multilingual platforms. The concepts of “multilingual teacher” and “digital multilingual didactics” are specified, collections of relevant educational mobile applications, Internet sites, as well as international databases are offered, allowing users to get acquainted with modern developments and approaches in various fields of professional activity in various languages. Based on the foregoing, the authors conclude that the integration of multilingual and digital education into the content of foreign language training of future teachers is not only potentially permissible and justified by the new requirements for teaching staff in the transforming labor market, but also predictable in terms of the dynamic process of internationalization, technologization and digitalization of the world community.

Keywords

Authors

References