Abstract:

The development of modern high-tech society requires adequate educational technologies that are supposed to provide a high level of intellectual development of students' perception, memory, thinking, attention, breadth of cognitive interests, level of logical operations.

The process of information exchange within the educational environment is characterized by cognitive technologies that encourage students to dialogue, meditation, research, logic analysis, increases the concentration of mental activity. Cognitive technologies in training mean the focus on student's conscious reasoning and information processing that is based on cognitive schemes and has a modular structure: input monitoring, analysis unit, procedural block [1].

Everything mentioned above can be applied to foreign language training with the view to train student's cognitive skills in a foreign language. The above skills seem to be crucial within the current international landscape of higher education, business and industrial development.
Cognitive approaches to foreign language teaching imply that foreign language learners construct a mental model of a reality by means of a foreign language, basing on their innate knowledge and reconstructing it with the view to a new reality.

There have been published a lot of research papers exploring cognitive technologies to develop students' writing, reading, listening skills by using various computer-based tools and creating specific web-based assignments [2,3,4]. In contrast, speaking skills development with web-based cognitive technologies have not been subject to comprehensive research yet.

The report focuses on the ways to integrate open educational resources into formal foreign language learning by using cognitive technologies; SpeakApps open educational resources are taken as an example.

Special emphasis will be laid to SpeakApps Tandem tool (a content management system for synchronous speaking tasks) that connects a pair of students and assigns them with roles based on different contents within the same assignment to encourage oral communication on a concrete topic. The report will provide findings of pilot training that combined traditional classroom activities and web-based self studies of students using SpeakApps Tandem tool that met the criteria of information processing cognitive technologies.

References:
[1] Anderson,J.R. (1983) the architecture of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard university press.
[2] Brown, A. L., Ambruster, B. B. and Baker, L. (1986). The Role of Metacognition in Reading and Studying. In J. Orasanu, (ed.), Reading Comprehension: From Research to Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[3] Plass, J., Chun, D., Mayer, R., & Leutner, D. (2003). Cognitive load in reading a foreign language text with multimedia aids and the influence of verbal and spatial abilities. Computers in Human Behavior, 19(2), 221-243.
[4] Warschauer, M., & Meskill, C. (2000). Technology and second language learning. In J. Rosenthal (Ed.), Handbook of undergraduate second language education (pp. 303-318). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Keywords:

Cognitive technologies in foreign language learning, SpeakApps, blended learning.