A Cognitive Style-Inclusive Approach as a Means of Learner-Centered EFL Teaching Mode Implementation

Introduction

Nowadays, the system of education in general and language education in particular puts forward the interests of learners as the cornerstone of all educational processes (Obdalova, 2009, 2014a, 2014b). The humanistic nature of education proclaims the priority of universal human values, human life and health, and freedom of personality development (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994; Soboleva & Obdalova, 2013a, 2013b, 2015a, 2015b). The contemporary understanding of education interprets it as a process of upbringing a human by providing all the necessary conditions for developing their personal, professional, and social skills with respect to individual unique abilities to promote their social self-identification and self-assurance. These conditions should create a student-centered responsive educational environment (Jones, 2007; Obdalova, 2009, 2015; Wright, 2011). According to Obdalova and Gural (2012), a conceptual framework for creating a supportive learning environment should be tailored to the objectives of foreign language teaching in modern Russian universities. However, this does not mean simply adding on technology, which obviously provides tremendously extended opportunities for the ongoing and more individualized learning process. Rather, it deals with the exploration of many factors that influence learning and brings them together in a model based on new approaches to learning, culture, language nature, and pedagogy (Obdalova, 2015).

The humanization of education exists in the learner-centered paradigm that defines almost all modern approaches to teaching, including teaching foreign languages. According to Elizarova (2001, pp. 5-6), the pedagogical process in foreign language education must have such an impact on an individual that it transforms them into a self-developing, emotionally and intellectually mature person capable of coping with unexpected intercultural communicative situations by turning to, or creating, unique tools for finding out, processing, and applying information. This impact might be achieved only if the learning process focuses on a student as the subject of education, and on their intellectual and ethical development. This means that all of a teacher’s methodological decisions “must be refracted through the prism of a learner’s individuality – his needs, motivations, abilities, activities, intelligence and other individual psychological characteristics” (Zimnyaya, 1991, p. 65). Subsequently, much attention has been paid to the development of cognitive and learning strategies that are taken into account to improve students’ learning performance and to develop their metacognitive abilities and awareness of the learning processes (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Cross, 2011; Field, 2000; Oxford, 1990).

Thus, the focus of higher foreign language education in training specialists who are ready to participate constructively in the dialogue of cultures gains a vector of personal determination, expressed through the functioning of an individual’s cognitive processes that underlie their communicative behavior and cognitive activity. However, the organization of the teaching process that implements this direction creates a very difficult task for a teacher whose educating activity is restricted to a very small number of classroom hours devoted to foreign language at non-linguistic faculties at the universities.