ELECTRONIC TESTS AS MEANS OF CONTROL OF THE BASIC COMPONENT OF SUCCESSFUL FOREIGN LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION IN THE GLOBAL COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT

He article reveals the basic role of linguistic competence for modern specialists who need to communicate effectively in a foreign language in the new global computer-mediated communication environment. Its formation has resulted from the progressive development and diffusion of modern media and Internet technologies. In connection with the existing situation, the objective of higher education institutions is to train future specialists to build professional dialogue with their colleagues coming from different cultures. As a result the academic standards for mastering foreign languages are raised. Consequently, proficiency in a foreign language, English in particular, has become an essential part of specialists’ professional qualifications. The main purpose of teaching a foreign language is to develop communicative competence, i.e. to realize linguistic competence in different situations of communication with special attention paid to grammar skills which constitute a basic component of the linguistic competence. Thus, it is important to choose carefully both the methods of grammatical competence formation and the forms of its control. In this article electronic tests are considered effective up-to-date means of control. In addition to this, the role of electronic tests in optimization of the teaching process is reviewed. At present there is a variety of electronic tests that can be used by foreign language teachers to assess students’ foreign language skills. However, the existing tests do not always meet the needs of certain groups of students. Moreover, these tests often leave out of account the students’ future professional activity specificity, but according to the new curriculum standards, language and communication for professional purposes should be taken into consideration at each stage of the teaching and learning process. In this connection, in 2010 we started developing electronic English grammar tests for the first- and second-year students studying at the Computer Science Department of Tomsk State University. The tests were compiled to correspond to the content and the level of difficulty and to comply with the students’ individual needs. The first test battery was designed for the learners of the intermediate level of communicative competence. The tests are aimed at practicing the usage of English verb tenses in the active voice. These are the tests of the multiple-choice format based on the vocabulary familiar to the students. We give reasons for our choice of the Virtual Learning Environment Moodle to deploy the tests. This learning environment has been used at Tomsk State University since 2006. Moodle provides the use of the electronic tests not only as progress achievement tests at the English lessons, but also for the students’ self-testing and self-training outside classroom at any stage of mastering appropriate English grammar structures.

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