Google Products as a Source of Students' Autonomy in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Abstract

The presented work is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of "educational autonomy", its description and the need for its implementation in the system of ontent and language integrated learning by means of the mobile learning tools. The article also provides the results of a pedagogical experiment aimed at the efficiency improvement of the educational process at a non-linguistic university. The main purpose of the study is to develop an autonomous learning model based on such very popular mobile applications as Google products and to demonstrate the intermediate results of experiment training, prior to implementation of the model at two Saint-Petersburg universities: Polytechnic and Civil Aviation. For getting this goal the authors suggest defining a category of students' "autonomy" not only within the traditional autonomy focused approach, but also in the framework of CLIL. Hereafter the work is dedicated to the didactic opportunities of the M-learning and "BYOD" policy for higher education. The paper also describes didactic potentials of such Google products, as Google Docs, Google Drive are Google Forms are analyzed. The use of Google products at each stage of experiment training together with the freedom of choice of educational tasks and real-time discussions proved their necessity and positive influence on reading and vocabulary skills acquisition.