Abstract
The paper deals with the issue of cognitive aspect of learning style of information technology (IT) students that is urgent in organising differentiated instruction of English for Specific Purposes at universities. R. Oxford's Style Analysis Survey and R. Amthauer's testing of intelligence have been used for studying the cognitive aspect. As the specifics of IT field are focused on such actions of IT specialists as perception, processing and implementation of textual, symbolic, graphical information, presented in oral and written forms, the most valuable parameters for organising the learning process and work with information for the future IT specialist are sensory modality (auditory, visual and kinesthetic) and the way of processing information (analytic and synthetic). Testing the third-year IT students and the fourth-year IT students has confirmed the statement of R. Oxford that learning styles are not dichotomous. Also, testing has shown that among auditory, visual, kinesthetic and mixed modalities of IT students, the dominant sensory modalities are auditory and mixed. Mixed modalities are represented by four groups of students: learners with visual, auditory and kinesthetic modality; learners with visual and kinesthetic modality; learners with visual and auditory modality; learners with auditory and kinesthetic modality. Testing results of the third-year and the fourth-year IT students’ way of processing ideas in the learning process indicate the tendency of predominance of the synthetic way of processing information and also mixed synthetic and analytic ways of processing information in the IT students. According to the R. Amthauer's test of the verbal and nonverbal intelligence of IT students can be presented as the relation 3(spatial)˂1(mathematical)˂2(verbal). The theoretical and practical thinking of the third- and fourth-year IT students are relatively balanced. All the specifics of IT students should be taken into account in the differentiated instruction of English for specific purposes. The ways of using such specifics are presented in recommendations.
Highlights
The tendency of intensive growth of the information technology(IT)-industry is dominant both in the whole world and in Ukraine in particular
Oxford's Style Analysis Survey for defining the language learning style dominances of the future IT specialists was conducted. This survey presents an analytical review of language learning style and has a number of advantages: firstly, it is developed for the needs of foreign language learning process; secondly, it allows one fully analyse the student’s individual characteristics in terms of his/her cognitive activity in the future professional sphere; thirdly, it enables a flexible assessment of IT students
Testing 238 third year IT students for determining the sensory modality dominance has shown that 23.9% of students have auditory modality, 10.9% of students – visual modality, and only 7.98% of students – dominant kinesthetic modality
Summary
The tendency of intensive growth of the information technology(IT)-industry is dominant both in the whole world and in Ukraine in particular. Due to the successful development and implementation of highquality IT products by Ukrainian IT specialists, Ukraine is becoming an important participator of various international projects. This leads to the necessity of preparation of the intellectual potential of highly skilled and competitive IT specialists for the IT industry in higher educational institutions. There is a need to research the ways to improve the learning process of foreign language for specific purposes. In the studies of educators and psychologists, the language learning style is perceived as “one of the factors that helps determine how – and how well – our students learn foreign language” That is why in our research the cognitive style is considered as a separate aspect of the language learning style
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