Abstract:

The paper deals with the major changes in the professional activities of technical specialists caused by the development of information society, which makes new demands for their professional competences and particularly to their foreign language communicative skills. The new aims of foreign language education require new approaches to all aspects of the language teaching and learning process, including its methodology and instruments. Of particular interest is the most appropriate strategies for developing learner autonomy in ICT-based language teaching and learning environment.

The basic idea of the proposed approach is the notion that different stages of a foreign language curriculum should be in compliance with different strategies of using ICT. These stages should gradually increase learner autonomy and ensure a step by step transfer of the learning process control to the students themselves, creating prerequisites for the transfer from the instruction process totally controlled by a teacher to the fully autonomous learning process.

Keywords:

Engineering education, reflective skills, autonomous learners, virtual environment, learning strategies.