Abstract:

The principal challenge among constellation of objectives in the informatization of education is to develop computer literacy of students. At the same time the process of informatization and development of computer literacy in regions with natural languages, for example in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation, has its own peculiarities. In general, the software is localized to English and Russian, consequently, the students with mother tongue other than Russian and low English language proficiency can face the problem of understanding and learning the interface and software manipulations.

Due to the following problem, it is essential to implement the learning approaches in which a foreign language is not only the object of study but also the means of gaining knowledge. CLIL is one of such approaches: it is focused on the integrated learning of content and a foreign language. The idea of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is to learn and use a foreign language synchronously. CLIL has already been used in the education system of Europe, and it has proved to be a success.

The aim of the study was to provide the scientific basis of CLIL and to verify experimentally the implementation of CLIL technology in a Russian higher education institution for developing computer literacy of Russian bilingual students.

As a result, we derived two main scientifically justified approaches to the implementation of math and science education for bilingual students in the educational instituitions of The Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. The first implies that bilingual students will adapt their mother tongue to the Russian education environment through bilingual education progamme. The second approach contains the idea of language immersion: teaching bilingual students by means of the Russian language.

In compliance of the first approach we designed a computer-assisted learning assistance of CLIL implementation for evolving computer literacy of bilingual Russian-Tatar students in the process of teaching Informatics. This computed-based learning assistance includes bilingual online resource “Teaching Informatics through Bilingual (Russian-Tatar) Framework”, educational web applications, virtual keyboard “Tiz.Yaz” for the Tatar language based on the operating system “Android”, bitexts for laboratory research in Informatics and also a latinizer. The bilingual resource consists of 7 modules. It was developed with the help of generally available technologies and Web 2.0 services. We also used screen casting, wiki markup (acronyms, converting spreadsheets and contact sheets).

The experiment was conducted to prove the effectiveness of CLIL technology for developing computer literacy of Tatar students. The Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication of Kazan Federal University was chosen as a place for the experiment: 69 students of the first year of education took part in the pilot testing. The results of the testing showed that the implementation of CLIL, as a technology for teaching Informatics, influences the evolvement of computer literacy of bilingual students in a positive way.

Keywords:

Bilingual education, computer literacy, Content and Language Integrated Learning.