Developing the English Language Communicative Competence of Future Teachers by Means of Mobile Apps

Abstract

The integration of Ukraine into the world community requires perfect mastery of English not only from citizens, but also from intending professionals. So, English proficiency becomes an important ability and additional educational skill of the future foreign language teachers. The article deals with using the mobile applications as the means of pre-service teachers’ English language communicative competence developing. At first, the main professionally oriented mobile applications for studying English and their advantages were identified. Then criteria and levels of assessing students’ English proficiency were defined. Four main language skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking) were chosen as the basic criteria and four levels (high, sufficient, average, low) of assessing undergraduates’ English language communicative competence were determined. During the implementing stage of pedagogical experiment, the respondents of experimental group used mentioned mobile apps with the aim of improving English. The comparison of the experimental and control groups took place at the ascertainment, and later at the control stages of the experiment with the help of mathematical statistics methods. The effectiveness of using mobile applications in order to improve English language skills during the educational process at the pedagogical faculty at the university has been proved.