Online training of secondary school graduates for the State Unified Exam in English (parts “Speaking” and “Writing”)

The article discusses the online training of secondary school leavers for the oral and written parts of the State Unified Exam in English (sections “Speaking” and “Writing” respectively). A brief description of the examination tasks, taking into account the changes made in 2022-2023, is given. The concept of “distance learning”, its advantages and disadvantages, the main forms of its implementation in the training of language production, as well as the comparison of digital tools used for distance training for the Exam are presented. Scientific novelty of the research consists of (a) typical problems that teachers and students face preparing for the Exam in a distant format; (b) examinees typical mistakes in open-type tasks of the Exam; (c) stages of the online training for (1) the oral and (2) written (Writing) parts of the Exam, as well as (3) the use of social networks by school-leavers are discussed. The findings showed that tasks “An oral thematic monologue statement based on a plan” and “An extended written statement based on a table / diagram)” cause the greatest difficulties. As for the use of social networks for the purpose of foreign language learning, the vast majority of respondents reported having such experience and named Telegram© the most popular service. Also, the analysis of average results of individual tasks completion along with typical mistakes made by examinees in the oral part of the Exam in 2020-2021 is provided. Among them are errors associated both with a low level of communicative and linguistic competences, and with weak meta-subject skills. On the basis of the data obtained, the stages of online preparation for the Exam tasks using the services of Flipgrid© (preparation for the oral part) and Telegram© (preparation for the “Writing” section) were identified. These include: (1) the development of linguistic competence by activation of students’ lexical and grammatical knowledge, (2) work on the criterion “performing communicative task”, (3) the use of audio recordings of students’ answers, (4) maintaining emotional and visual contact during on-line conversations, (5) the use of verbal and visual supports in the construction of oral responses.

Flipgrid©, Telegram©, English, productive speech, State Unified Exam, speaking, writing, distant format, Flipgrid©, Telegram©