Promoting International Students' Autonomy: the Experience of Tomsk Polytechnic University

Abstract

The current study aims to define the optimal language teaching conditions for international students to exhibit and develop their autonomy. The survey of foreign and domestic scientific research works provided the grounds upon which to elaborate the concept of autonomy as a combination of activity-meaningful personal qualities necessary for a language learner to become an effective language user, who is able to develop and make full use of communicative abilities in order to successfully accomplish communicative tasks by means of a foreign language. Based on the structural components of Self-conception (cognitive, affective, conative), the typological characteristics of the dynamics in the development of student autonomy in the process of language training are introduced as the levels and criteria for evaluation. The results of diagnostic measuring of autonomy using expert assessment method, combined with students' self-evaluation at the intermediate and concluding stages of the pedagogic experiment, demonstrated evident positive dynamics in the experimental groups by contrast with one control group. The results obtained in the experimental study prove that the established language teaching conditions are efficient.