Abstract:

The processes of globalization and informatization have been changing all the aspects of social life, including the sphere of language education in Russia, creating the conditions for intensive use of modern information technologies in education in order to make it more effective and competitive.

The article is devoted to the study of the English language course, offered in the program Duolinguo. It is a didactic program for self-study of foreign languages. Within the lesson the students are given interactive exercises aimed at spelling skills training, expanding the vocabulary, studying grammar rules, skills of correct pronunciation and listening tasks.

The relevance of this research is justified by the contradiction between the didactic potential of modern information technologies in formation of foreign language communicative competence in secondary school students and the lack of their use in educational process.
The aim of the article is to identify the effectiveness of English language teaching based on modern information technologies during the process of education on the example of the program Duolingo. To attain the set goals the following research methods were used: theoretical study and synthesis of scientific and methodological literature as well as Internet resources related to the research topic; general scientific methods – analysis and synthesis; a set of tests in order to define the students’ level of knowledge; pedagogical survey and quantitative methods.

The research demonstrates the results of the pedagogical survey held among the secondary school students: the use of the program Duolingo at the English language lessons helps us achieve increase of the knowledge quality and the motivation level, economizes the teacher’s time, rises the level of fairness in knowledge evaluation, and enhances the level of informational and communicational literacy; the program provides high adaptibility, giving a chance to study and revise the material, train and control taking into consideration individual students' peculiarities; realizes the principle of interactive education and gives a chance to use the mobile technologies popularity to optimize the educational process, but not to accept these technologies as a means of entertainment and distraction during the lessons.

The practical significance of the study is that the results can facilitate the choice of online programs and mobile technologies for language teaching lessons.

Analyzing all the above mentioned we can state that creation and use of new interactive methods let us solve one of the most important aims – rising the quality of education under the conditions of developing information-oriented society in terms of the use of modern information technologies.

In this study, we focused on the secondary stage of education, but further research would provide opportunities for analyzing the use of interactive methods at the high stage of education as well.

Keywords:

Program Duolingo, secondary stage of education, pedagogical survey, interactive exercises, information technologies, mobile technologies.