Developing Tatar-Russian Bilingual Students’ Computer Literacy Using Web-Based Computer Science CLIL Course

Abstract

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Developing students’ computer literacy is the main objective of digitizing education. However, developing students’ computer literacy has its own peculiarities in bilingual regions like the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation. In general, students with a mother tongue other than Russia, who show a low level of Russian language proficiency, can face the problem of understanding and studying computer interface and using software. Hence, it is essential to implement learning approaches where the second language is not only a curricular subject but also a means of acquiring knowledge. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is one of the methodologies of bilingual education, which is focused on teaching academic content through a second language. The aim of the study was to develop bilingual (Tatar-Russian) web-based CLIL course to be used in teaching Computer Science to Tatar-Russian bilingual students. One of the main CLIL strategies is scaffolding which implies support provided by a teacher in a number of different ways. Visualization is one of the teaching strategies used to create educational materials for a CLIL course. Synthesizing verbal and visual elements within the limits of one text optimized the process of semantic perception and understanding text content. The experiment was conducted at the Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication of Kazan Federal University to verify the effectiveness of CLIL implementation for developing computer literacy of Tatar-speaking students, with 69 first-year Tatar-Russian bilingual students being involved. The results show that the implementation of CLIL as a bilingual technology while teaching Computer Science has a positive impact on developing computer literacy of bilingual students.