New Perspectives in Science Education

The advent of distance education elicits new challenges and issues in learning/teaching English as a foreign language. The nexus of language acquisition with online resources and tools is evident. The current paper delineates online language instruction focusing on meaning-making track. Meaning-making track is the system of meaningful and engaging technologies with the focus of personal relevance of EFL for individual development, boosting their transferrable skills and learner autonomy. Against the backdrops of research, the experiment was carried out. The pool of participants was 60 tertiary students of Southern Federal University, Russia. The cohort was divided into two groups, experimental one (n=30), and control group (n=30). All of them were subject to online delivery. Experimental trainees studied the English language using meaning-making track, while the control counterparts were involved in the online content-based tuition. The substantial body of data that rest on research serves to demonstrate that motivational dynamics of experimental group has grown compared to the control group. The semantic context played a pivotal role in increasing learning motivation and linguistic fluency. Through this type of research, we proved that leveraging meaning-making techniques enhance intrinsic motivation of e-learning of a novel language.

Key-words: meaning-making track, English as a foreign language, intrinsic motivation, innovative technologies, distance education.

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