THE REASONS AND FEATURES FOR A LANGUAGE BARRIER AMONG STUDENTS IN THE PROCESS OF LEARNING A SECOND FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Nowadays there are high incidences in the emergence of a language barrier among students in the humanitarian sphere, mainly among future translators and interpreters, while studying a second foreign language that have prompted us to do the research. The purpose is to understand the difficulties that students face while speaking a second foreign language. The online questionnaire was prepared, the answers were given by about sixty students in higher educational institutions of the Central region of Russia. The obtained data were subjected to statistical and analytical processing and presented in the form of graphs. As a result of a comparative analysis of empirical data, the reasons for a language barrier in various situations of foreign communication were identified. In particular, it has been found that the students’ language barrier studying a second foreign language is caused by fear, which is especially high during the monologue in front of a group. In situations of educational communication, excitement and anxiety is caused by the teacher’s personal suggestion to answer, as well as the necessity to formulate his own opinion on the topic under discussion. The study provides a detailed description of students’ feelings. Half of the respondents associate their negative emotions with the fear of making a mistake, followed by the fear of being in an awkward situation. A third part of the respondents considers their fear to be unconscious. It has been found that fear in front of the other students in the audience is almost three times stronger than in front of a teacher. As far as the main reason for a language barrier is concerned, students indicate an insufficient level of proficiency in a second foreign language. Interestingly, the fear of getting a bad mark is common only to five percent of the respondents. In other cases, the students’ problem is in their psychological characteristics (tightness, low self-esteem, the impression that they will create on others, etc.). It has been found that, in contrast to the situation of educational communication, while communicating with a native speaker, the fear of making a mistake occurs less than half. Students suppose that the best study of the second foreign language will help them to overcome the language barrier, they should use it outside the educational process and communicate more in the digital space. In this case, the teacher’s support is estimated at twice as much as the classmates’ support. The research includes generalization of work experience in overcoming the language barrier with the help of information technology among students.

Keywords: language barrier, fear of speaking a foreign language, learning second foreign languages, information technology in learning a foreign language, information technology during the foreign class