Implementation of Edutainment Technology in Foreign Students’ Language Teaching

Abstract

In the context of globalization, many Russian universities are interested in attracting foreign students to receive higher education, however, for successful studying, foreign students need to integrate into education process, as well as into the socio-cultural life of the country. The contradictions that arise between the requirements of modern society for the effective integration of foreign students into the educational process and the insufficient development of the methodology for teaching a foreign language to foreign students lead to the need to develop a new learning technology. The purpose of the research is to analyze the use of edutainment technology means in teaching English for groups of foreign students of South Ural State University. The authors analyzed the concept of "edutainment technology"; revealed the awareness of foreign students about the types of means of edutainment technology in the education process of the university; analyzed the effectiveness of the use of edutainment technology in foreign language teaching. The educators' attitude to the use of edutainment technology as a means of language training was revealed. The edutainment technology was introduced into the process of teaching English to foreign students, based on the analysis of educators' answers. To perform the tasks the theoretical (analysis of existing research) and empirical (questionnaires, interviews, Cronbach's alpha method of mathematical data processing) methods were applied. The results of the study showed that most of the students were not aware of some of the means of edutainment technology and their application possibilities. Educators were not aware of many of the edutainment technology means. The main difficulties the educators faced were: lack of time to master this technology, lack of knowledge of new tools. These results will help educators and specialists in the field of language training in teaching English to foreign students using edutainment.