Abstract:

The article is dedicated to the usage of the new information technologies for students to solve problems of the text analysis in the practicum as a part of the master’s degree program.

In terms of the massive spread of innovative computer technologies and the rapid growth of the amount of unstructured data on the Internet, as a part of the educational process students have to gain new competencies that are related to the ability to analyze data and text. Teaching data analysis to students is successfully done with the help of the applied statistical analysis methods and corresponding software programs and their widespread use in the student practicum. The text analysis is a relatively new topic in the educational process, and modern methods of building the necessary competencies within the framework of the course for graduate students studying the methods of quantitative linguistics and new information technologies are still in development. This determines the relevance of this article.

The purpose of this study is to develop a standard model of a scalable and ready-to-use educational module of text analysis in various groups of master students, as well as to develop algorithms for students using it in practical work in terms of full-time in-class learning and distance learning.
The authors of the article used the following research methods: analysis of scientific literature, diachronic analysis, content analysis, statistical analysis, modeling and conducting experiments. Drawing on many years of personal experience of creating teaching materials and teaching graduate students, the authors analyzed the specifics of organizing and conducting classes of students’ groups with various specialties.

The authors developed a model of a scalable educational module of text analysis designed as a part of the practicum. It consists of the following laboratory works:
1) Diachronic studies (based on the Russian National Corpus and the Google Books Ngram Corpus).
2) Content analysis.
3) Word cloud.
4) Correlation constellations.
5) Online translators.
6) Synchronous mobile translators.
7) Optical text recognition systems. 8) Voice assistants.

Students are supposed to conduct a small individual study within each laboratory work. The amount of students’ work is predetermined based on the ability to change the scale of the developed educational module and on the educational aims for each studying group, whether it is to familiarize literary scholars with the algorithms of the modern diachronic analysis, or to analyze in depth the quality of modern online translators in groups of linguists as future language teachers or simultaneous interpreters.

The developed learning model, in addition to a set of laboratory works, has a bank of test questions to evaluate students' academic achievements that they get after finishing the practicum.

The practical result of the study consists in the development of an educational module to teach text analysis. The module was tested in various groups of graduate students learning the methods of the quantitative linguistics and new computer technologies in terms of both full-time in-class learning and distance learning. A bank of test questions dedicated to the subject of a text analysis educational module was developed and registered in the Federal Service for Intellectual Property of the Russian Federation.

Keywords:

Student, master’s course, linguistics, practicum, educational module, text analysis, diachronic studies, content analysis, online translation.