Teaching foreign-language semantic reading of professionally-oriented texts based on students’ learning styles

Abstract

Importance. The principle of individualization in developing skills of foreign-language semantic reading professionally oriented texts based on students’ learning styles is studied. The relevance of the study is due to the demand for an adaptive home reading system for students majoring in nonlinguistic fields.Materials and Methods. The ways of diagnosing the learning styles of second-year engineering students using the questionnaire of R. Felder and B. Solomon are described and individualized tasks for improving the semantic reading skills in English according to students’ learning styles are proposed.Results and Discussion. The use of the Felder–Silverman model of learning styles, describing various styles of perception, input, processing and understanding of the information received seems to be an important variable to study, since it helps to individualize the various stages of working with a foreign language text. The results of the experimental training proved that the proposed approach positively influenced the students’ progress in foreign-language semantic reading.Conclusion. Determining the learning styles of students enables university lecturers to take into account the individual characteristics of students’ cognitive processes, their current cognitive strategies and, thus, individualize foreign language teaching.