PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AT A UNIVERSITY DURING THE PANDEMIC: ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

Abstract

The article examines the experience of online teaching at Russian universities during the pandemic. It identifies problems of distance learning as well as its advantages and disadvantages. Special attention is given to the experience of organising distance learning. Learning a foreign language is a cooperation between a student and a teacher, a well-tuned machine, a system that allows to create a communicative language teaching environment. Many teachers faced the necessity to reshape and reorganize the ways of cooperation with students, the ways to motivate them and monitor their activities, tools to assess the learning outcome owing to current changes. The author justifies the necessity to update the national model of distance learning and particularly of foreign languages. The article suggests that it is possible to transform part of learning process into a digital environment.