Foreign Language Communicative Training as a Means of Senior Students' Personality Social Development in the Conditions of a Modern Information Society

The aim of this article is to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of the foreign language communicative training technology for high school students' personal social development in classes of English under conditions of modern information society. To reach the aim, the authors first formulate the key features of virtual communication and its differences from real communication. These include: (1) a high degree of efficiency; (2) the anonymous nature of communication; (3) the absence of stressful factors of a real socializing environment. These features makes virtual communication more attractive for the younger generation. However, as a result of the substitution of real and virtual communication, the following hard-to-correct personality deficits may appear: (1) disorientation in real communication; (2) a gap in communication between generations; (3) the difficulty of social integration in society. In order to neutralize these negative trends, it is necessary to enforce the socially developing potential of foreign language in high school by the means of the foreign language communicative training technology, which has the following unique characteristics: (1) focus on the development of not only general communicative skills, but also the special skills of the communicative, perceptual, and interactive aspects of students' communication; (2) creation of conditions for a person's active secondary socialization in a foreign language society; (3) use of a foreign language as a means of achieving a communicative goal. The structure of the training includes several stages: the introductory stage, the stage of initial analysis of the communicative-dialogic situation, the stage of the search for effective ways to implement dialogue interaction, the stage of the development of dialogic speech skills at the micro-level, the stage of the development of dialogic speech skills at the macro-level, the stage of reflection. The composition of the foreign language communicative training includes the following types of communicative exercises: (1) communicative-stimulating; (2) communicative-analytical; (3) communicative-constructing; (4) communicative-consolidating; (5) communicative-developing; (6) communicative-reflecting. Practical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed educational technology were carried out on the basis of secondary schools in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. The stage of experimental training included series of lessons built on the model of the foreign language communicative training and was carried out according to its stages described above. The effectiveness of the described technology was evaluated by the mathematical method of estimation of the increase in the development of dialogic speech skills of high school students in the communicative, perceptual and interactive aspects of communication. Based on the results of the experimental training, it was concluded that the foreign language communicative training has a positive effect on the social and communicative development of the high school students's personality.

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