Online excursions as tools for teaching a foreign language in the university's informational educational environment

The article focuses on the problem of organizing online excursions in a foreign language in a specially selected and organized informational educational environment of the university for non-linguistic students. In order to organize this environment, it is necessary to take into account the principles of intercultural and professional orientation, the principle of informational fullness, the comparative principle, the principles of personal and subjective individualization, as well as informational sufficiency. These principles allow organizing a technology of conducting online excursions related, firstly, to the emotional sphere of students, where the goals, values, motives and attitudes of each student are taken into account by building individual educational trajectories, and, secondly, to organize virtual tours in a foreign language in such a way that they are aimed at consistently mastering all types of speech activity (reading, listening, speaking, and writing). The aim of the article is to present the technology of organizing online excursions as a thoughtful display of sights, historical and cultural monuments in real time, as well as the results of its experimental verification for preparing students for foreign language communication. The methodological basis of the research is a combination of competence-based, environmental and intercultural approaches. The research methods are the analysis of literature connected with the problem, questionnaires, experimental training, quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results, statistical and two-factor variance analysis of data. The article presents the technology of organizing online excursions in the informational educational environment of the university. Due to the consideration of the principles of selection and organization, an online excursion is a tool that allows the teacher to structure and present linguistic and cross-cultural material. However, at the same time, virtual tours require preliminary preparation and clear staging, which will allow students to understand and analyze historical and cultural information, participate in discussions and express their opinions about historical events, people and objects. The metrics which are described in the article allow determining and evaluating the level of foreign language proficiency during online excursions. The article describes the progress and results of an experimental study aimed at identifying the effectiveness of using online excursions as an additional tool in teaching foreign language communication, which leads to the formation of foreign language communicative competence. The results of the study and the statistical and two-factor analysis of the data proved the viability and effectiveness of using online excursions as part of the educational process for teaching a foreign language in the informational educational environment of the university.