Teaching Language in the Digital Era: Readiness and Expectations of Future Teachers

Digital competence is an integral part of a modern teacher's job description including a Russian language teacher. Courses in pedagogical universities curricula as well as refresher courses of in-service teachers are targeted at the development of this competence. Contents of such programs generally suggest education in two domains: technical and pedagogical. However, the success of acquiring each of the domains is determined by initial student's profile, such as the level of basic digital literacy, readiness to learn new technologies and pedagogical models, etc.The focus of this research is to define the correlation between educational digital technologies course results and the learner's personality in this course. Several research questions have been raised, such as what factors as the general digital literacy level of student, teaching experience, experience of applying digital tools in work and study, the declared area of the student's interest affecting learning outcomes, and which digital language learning areas students find the most promising before and after the course.The context of the research is implementation of the course "Information technologies in professional activity" in the 1st year of the specialized master's degree "Methodology of teaching Russian as a Foreign Language" at the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. The data analyzed in the research were collected during 2 years with the involvement of survey methods (before and after the course). The information about participants' academic success on the course results was used to assess the results of training.The results of the research allow us to conclude that learning outcomes in the field of digital language teaching to the greatest extent correlate to such initial parameters as the degree of thoroughness of the expectations from the course and experience in usage of technologies in their pedagogical practice. The study also found that the expectations of the students were mostly focused on specific programs and resources before the course, whereas after the course the emphasis has shifted to novel pedagogical ideas, models and powerful learning environment driven by digital technologies.