COOPERATIVE LEARNING TO FORM COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

The article discusses the features of cooperative learning in universities, as well as its poten-tial advantages related to edutainment, gamification, digital storytelling, and pitching. This innovative tech-nology involves collaborative activities among students in small groups under the guidance of an instructor to achieve specific educational goals. Positive interactions among group members, individual responsibility of each participant, mutual encouragement of success in the student-student and student-instructor interaction, and the development of soft skills are the main components of cooperative learning. The research aims to develop and test a cooperative technology to form communicative competence of students of Russian higher education institutions. The authors developed a cooperative technology to form communicative competence of students, identified the characteristics of the technology, determined students' expectations from the technology used, and tested the technology through pedagogical experimentation. The study employed theoretical (integrative literature review, modeling) and empirical (survey, questionnaires, pedago¬gical experiment, descriptive statistics) methods. The experiment involved first-year bachelor's students from the advanced engineering school “Heart of Ural” at South Ural State University. The effectiveness of the developed technology was demonstrated based on the following criteria: the improvement of foreign language proficiency according to the European CEFR scale, motivation, and teamwork skills.