Abstract:

Teaching within the Communicative Language Teaching paradigm implies a vital importance attached to speaking skills development as part of learners’ foreign language competence. Undoubtedly, it is easier to teach speaking skills in class when students are engaged in doing necessary tasks and activities aimed at speaking skills improvement within the topic under consideration. Teaching speaking as part of students’ independent work is undeniably much more challenging as it is difficult for teachers to monitor and evaluate students’ oral speech. Besides that, it should be noted that in some educational contexts, where English (or another language) is taught as a foreign language, learners have limited opportunities to use the language outside the classroom, if any at all. Partly, this explains a prevailing trend of integrating technology into face-to-face teaching in order to increase the learners’ chances of practicing the target language in the mode of extracurricular learning activities based on video technology.

This paper analyses the effects of specific professionally-oriented tasks involving video recordings aimed at increasing foreign language speaking fluency of technical university undergraduates, and the main objectives of the research are:
- to investigate speaking fluency development as an essential aspect of oral communication;
- to investigate a motivating effect of available video technologies through literature analysis in order to identify their most appropriate uses in language learning in higher education;
- to present a modification of professionally-oriented video technology aimed at fluency improvement of the target learner audience through
the use of video recordings.

Communicative competence is discussed as the main objective of learning foreign languages, with video resources and technologies being crucial motivating factors in the process of learning a foreign language in higher education. Research papers on the use of video technology for teaching foreign language speaking skills are studied, with special attention paid to those aimed at extracurricular student work. One of the new video technology application features to be discussed is the application of a visual-only video teaching strategy for engineering students involving tailor-made video recordings which students discuss using a social media platform. Another video technology involves students’ video recordings analyzed by the instructor in order to measure learners’ fluency improvement. The integration of these and other technologies is considered as a proposed original modification of the professionally-oriented video technology using VideoAnt and Mindmeister programs. This flipped classroom technology aimed at increasing learner speaking fluency was developed in a Russian technical university. Testing it at Bonch university of St.Petersburg showed improvement in fluency.

Keywords:

Communicative competence, speaking fluency, video technology, independent student work, higher education