Formation of future teachers’ intercultural tolerance through digital learning resource at professional education institutions

Abstract

Introduction. The worldwide globalisation processes lead to academic mobility of students, which is expressed in the possibility of entering any educational institutions, including those located abroad. As a consequence, educational institutions are developing a special intercultural learning environment, where peaceful coexistence is largely determined by the presence of such quality as intercultural tolerance. This quality is especially important for students of pedagogical specialties since the quality of educational process and the psychological climate within the involved learners’ team will depend on them. Therefore the problem of formation of intercultural tolerance comes to the fore. Materials and methods. The research involved 81 pedagogical-profile students of the 1st-4th years of study at the State budget-funded educational institution of secondary vocational education of Kaluga region “A.P. Churilin Kirov Industrial and Pedagogical College”. The teaching at experimental groups involved the use of specially developed technology for foreign-language teaching and the digital educational resource. The control groups worked under a teaching technology described in the programme for the discipline “Foreign language”. In order to assess the level of formation of intercultural tolerance, A. Kyveralg’s method was used, which allows the researcher to evaluate the general level of formation of the explored phenomenon proceeding from each component’s indicators. The mathematical and statistical processing of the results was carried out using Pearson’s chi-squared test (χ2). Results. A number of statistically significant differences were revealed in the distribution between the control and experimental groups under the following indicators: motivational χ2=16.98 and χ2=31.369), cognitive (χ2=21.123 and χ2=38.956), activity-based (χ2=12.588 and χ2=8.75) and reflexive (χ2=7.892 and χ2=7.317). Conclusion. The diagnostic indicators made it possible to conclude that the students in the experimental groups used the methods of intercultural interaction that are based on the knowledge of cultural diversity of educational process participants, the ability to apply different interaction methods from the positions of the explored phenomenon, to seek ways out of conflict situations independently, to plan educational and professional activities.