The development of educational autonomy in the conditions of group work on the author’s electronic manual on a remote educational platform

Importance. Learning autonomy should be developed for a number of reasons. Firstly, educational technologies paved the way for students’ independent cognitive activities. The second reason is the paradigm shift brought about by social and political changes: nowadays students are more focused on their own educational progress than on teamwork aimed at helping their peers. Thirdly, since groups of learners are getting bigger, students do not get enough practice in class, so they need to learn to work autonomously so that they can follow the syllabus.The objective of the study is to develop the students’ skills of learning autonomy as well as foreign-language communicative skills by organizing teamwork on an online platform.Materials and methods. The subjects of the experiment were 70 freshmen and sophomores majoring in linguistics from Peter the Great Saint Petersburg State Polytechnic University. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether teamwork is conducive to the development of students’ learning autonomy and whether their collaboration on a distance learning platform contributes to acquiring foreign-language speaking skills.Results and Discussion. In the exposure groups, where the students did their home assignment in small teams on a distance learning platform, the scores for the final conversational task were better than those in the reference groups, where the students working on a distance learning platform were not divided into teams, and where the teacher helped the whole group do their home assignment. On top of that, the levels of learning autonomy in the exposure groups were higher than those in the reference groups.Conclusion. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that we used a number of existing academic papers to develop the assessment criteria for linguistic majors’ foreign-language conversational skills. In addition, we designed a questionnaire for assessing the level of learning autonomy. The experiment allowed us to establish that teamwork is the best way to organize foreign-language practice on an online platform because each student has more time to develop conversational skills and to learn to work autonomously than in an EFL class where the teacher works with the whole group.