Anatoliy Nikolaev’s research while affiliated with North-Eastern Federal University and other places

The article reveals for the first time the features of the methodology and a new approach in teaching the visually impaired people with special educational needs, including the totally blind people on the example of teaching foreign languages. This technique is innovative and can be used for didactic purposes in teaching any subject matter to people with visual impairments of all ages, including totally blind people in terms of inclusive education. Results of the experimental study are based on the testing of a purpose-designed computer program “Communicative English for Students with Visual Problems”, which was successfully implemented in the State Educational Institution of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) “Republican Special (Correctional) Boarding School” for children with visual and hearing impairments. The experiment involved middle and high school students, as well as students of the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Russia. The program was tested by visually impaired students with special educational needs. In total, 15 students of 8–9 grades with various visual impairments, and 7 university students participated in the experiment. In order to clarify the effectiveness of the computer technology use for all categories with visual impairments, students were divided into three differentiated groups: visually impaired, people with residual vision and totally blind.

Each language has its own characteristics and prosodic features of the utterance, that is, each language has its own prosodic basis. Prosodic systems of different languages also have their own differences, along with the universal and common typological features. The utterances produced by the Yakut-Russian bilinguals can have incorrect intonation as compared to the conventional Standard English (British normative language – Received Pronunciation) in the process of foreign language communication. The reason for this phenomenon is a number of factors, primarily the influence of the prosodic system of the native (Yakut) language. Secondly this can be facilitated by the prosodic system influence of non-native (Russian) language, which they speak quite freely in both natural and classroom environments. Other linguistic factors also play an important role; in particular, it is characterized by varying degrees of bilingualism, possessed by the students, a way of mastering them, as well as various extra-linguistic factors. In this article we have observed the influence of a native language of the Yakut students when they pronounce English disjunctive question sentences in the classroom and have revealed the prosodic features of the Yakut language intonation that can be interfering in perception by the speakers of English as their native language.

The article is devoted to problems of accessibility to quality education in small nomadic schools. In this paper the problems of nomadic schools are considered from the point of view of current modernization processes, taking place in the Russian Federation in the field of general secondary and higher professional education. Herein we consider the problems of small schools, including nomadic, which teach children of small peoples of the North. The development of nomadic schools, in our opinion, should be considered comprehensively, not as a separate segment, but in the context of improving the quality of life and well-being of the Arctic territories inhabitants who live in severe climatic conditions.

In this paper, we describe the concept “self-development” in a context of philosophical, psychological and pedagogical science. The essence of the process of self-development appears in different philosophical and psychological scientific schools. Definition of self-development of the personality in distance learning of a foreign language is given. Efficiency of distance education technologies for self-development of the personality is shown by practical consideration. Vast territory, distant locality, undeveloped infrastructure and seasonal character of transport lines of communication are the most common features of foreign language teaching in the Far North regions of the Russian Federation, particularly in the Sakha Republic. In these circumstances, we consider Distance e-Learning to be one of the most optimal form of foreign language learning. The article considers Distance e-Learning as a combination of Distance Education and e-Learning which is characterized by the extensive use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in the delivery of education and instruction as well as the use of synchronous and asynchronous online communication in an interactive learning environment or virtual communities, instead of a physical classroom, to bridge the gap in temporal or spatial constraints.

The article is devoted to the problem of prosodic interference in the situation of artificial (i.e. classroom) multilingualism, which is characterized by interaction of three languages with different prosodic systems. The article reveals how intonational transfer of English special question manifests itself in the speech of students, the bilinguals of the Yakut and Russian languages, who learn English as a foreign language. The results of comparative analysis of English special question, produced by the Yakut-Russian bilinguals, help to find the most probable ways of prosodic interference of bilinguals while learning English as a foreign language. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s7p242