A Study Of Issues Concerning Evaluation And Selection Of Mobile Applications For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language To Native Russian Speakers

Owing to new advancements in IT,approaches to foreign language(FL)or second language(SL)teaching and learning have diversified and their efficiency has been increasingly enhanced too.Mobile apps have become widely used in the teaching of foreign languages(TFL).However,in the sphere of teaching Chinese as a foreign language(TCFL)to native Russian speakers,there has not been much detailed research on methodological issues in the evaluation and selection of such mobile applications.This dissertation attempts to address various issues concerning the design,content,functionality,and application of mobile apps for TCFL,as well as methodological issues,in the context of TCFL to native Russian speakers.Due to historically determined features and characteristics of the Oriental languages teaching in Russia,despite major developments in Computer Assisted Language Learning(CALL),there is no clear and unified methodologically-based system for monitoring and evaluating the usage and outcome of mobile applications for teaching Chinese to Russian-speaking learners.This study has been conducted in various directions in accordance with practical necessity:research discusses where Mobile-Assisted Language Learning(MALL)fits in best in Second Language Acquisition(SLA)and clarifies a few points about the concept of MALL and the quality of mobile application for language learning as a tool produced by the IT industry for wide consumption among foreign language learners.The second part of the research is devoted to discussions of the choice,practical analysis,and implementation of mobile applications,namely,mobile applications evaluation and selection.The peculiarities of teaching Chinese to Russian-speaking students are discussed,and the distinctive features and functions of mobile applications are compared with those of other similar tools(e.g.,CALL,Mobile Learning,Distance Learning,etc.).In order to meet the specific TCFL requirements,follow specific methodological principles and create an up-to-date checklist for mobile applications,it is also necessary to understand the typology of training applications on the market today.Furthermore,it is necessary to investigate how and why users prefer one or another application.For this purpose,a user survey and an analysis of the results have been conducted.In addition,a discussion on the features of successful mobile applications is carried out,thereby conducting a comparative analysis of examples and yielding a number of research findings.Based on the research described above,this study has yielded a complete list of linguistic and methodological requirements for the evaluation and selection of mobile applications for successful TCSL for native Russian speakers today.Those requirements have implications for the development of similar IT-based industrial products for foreign language teaching.The last part of this dissertation summarizes the major findings of this study.In addition,possibilities for big data integration into MALL in the future and the limitations of this study are discussed.