ACQUISITION OF METACOGNITIVE AND SOCIAL LEARNING STRATEGIES THROUGH UNDERGRADUATES’ RESEARCH PROJECT

The university curriculum in Russia includes a disproportionately small amount of academic hours for foreign language acquisition, so the learning process involves an intensive self-learning. This necessitates developing appropriate conditions for students’ autonomous and self-regulated work, fostering research skills and developing creative thinking in future professionals. As a consequence, there’s a fast adaptation to the general academic process and better mastering a foreign language. Besides, university students get the opportunity to apply academic knowledge, practice their professional skills, and thereby, to feel the real taste of the future occupation.

Since nowadays one of the most urgent problems of any big city is well-being of the citizens, the undergraduates were asked to examine the urban discourse landscape as a hypertext. They had to develop a plan and design of the small group research project, elaborate methods of its analysis, interview people in the streets, and finally, describe the resulting attitudes of the city population to giving foreign names to city businesses.

A large amount of students’ autonomous work, group coordination, search and decision making, self-correction and self-evaluation in the research analysis contributed to the development of the new metacognitive and social learning strategies. The data obtained during the street interviews, conducted among 103 persons and guests of the large Ural city, were presented at the Interuniversity scientific conference Linguistics: from theory to practice.

A significant difference in the questionnaire results (Metacognitive Awareness Inventory) shown before launching the project and after its completion, enables the authors to consider further application of the project method in the frame of the undergraduates’ research and predict inclusion of the project-members in the prospective research at the higher academic levels.