Digital Literacy as a Meta-Cognitive Component of Younger Students’ Intellectual and Creative Potential in Foreign Language Lessons

Abstract

The article reflects on the results of the digital literacy study in the structure of the meta-cognitive component of the intellectual and creative potential of younger schoolchildren in foreign language lessons. The team of authors substantiates the relevance of approaches to understanding digital literacy as an element of meta-cognitive skills and its increasing role in the development of language education in modern conditions of electronic information society. The scientific and analytical baggage of scientific and pedagogical research of Kazakhstani and foreign authors made it possible to identify the features of universality and meta-subjectivity inherent in the psychological and pedagogical phenomenon of digital literacy. Hypothesis: self-mastery of a foreign language in the modern information and communication space acquires the features of meta-subjects under the influence of digital literacy of students. The revealed similarity of skills and knowledge of speech-thinking activity and digital literacy as metacognitive categories and aspects of meta-knowledge form the intellectual and creative potential of a student’s personality. The results of the study prove that digital literacy as an element of the meta-cognitive component of the intellectual and creative potential of students has an intensifying effect on the development of speech-thinking skills in younger schoolchildren. The results obtained are based on experimental data confirming that the integration of techniques, methods, and means for the development of digital literacy acts as an intensifier of speech-thinking processes, increasing the effectiveness of teaching a foreign language in primary school. Among the defiantly difficult is the task set by the author’s team: to create a universal psychological and pedagogical algorithm to improve the meta-cognitive component of the intellectual and creative potential of a younger student with the actualization of the methodology of digital literacy in the humanities of the language cycle (state languages, literature, foreign languages, social studies, history, etc.). The training sample consisted of data obtained in the course of ascertaining and modeling experiments from real texts written by schoolchildren. Each text was checked and marked up by two experts in accordance with the levels of psychological, pedagogical, and subject competencies, which made it possible to determine the dynamics of digital literacy of younger schoolchildren in the structure of metacognitive activity of students learning foreign languages, which makes it possible to verify it as the core of the intellectual and creative potential of the student. The authors believe that the digital literacy of a modern student is a “soft power” of a new type of linguodidactics since it allows reformatting the speech and behavioral value matrix of the younger generation under the influence of the translation of priority standards of behavior in a particular ethnic society. Digital literacy is an unconditional way to expand the possibilities of developing an individual system of metacognition, determining the significant potential of its integration with the content of the foreign language teaching program in elementary grades.