TEACHING REASONING: A COGNITIVE-CULTURAL APPROACH

This paper describes personal reasoning peculiarities of Russian undergraduate students viewed through the prism of their culture and their psycho-typical characteristics. The experimental study showed specificity of argument formation in the students’ reasoning about their cultural values. Our experiment identified the respondents’ poles within the cognitive style ‘abstract / concrete conceptualization’ based on their verbalization of the primary values. Four levels of concept abstraction were detected and proved by the students’ verbal manifestations: the resulting students’ texts showed remarkable differences between the poles concerning preferences of argument exposition, both in its construction schemes and in the choice of components of the arguments. We thus state that the degree of variability of the students’ value assessment correlates with the degree of formation of the mechanism of differentiation in value orientations. Our recommendations for teaching reasoning concern: linguistically based principles of student cognitive differentiation which minimize distractive factors; choice of teaching tasks depending on the student specific conceptualization pole; and ways of activating differentiation and integration operations in reasoning. In a broader context of education, students’ individual peculiarities and cognitive preferences should be focused on training which stimulate the students’ learning interest.

An Effective Way to Teach Language Processing Courses

All of us that teach Language Processing topics are aware that a great part of the students face big difficulties and a lack of motivation inherent to the concept abstraction level and to the technical capacities required to implement efficient processors. In order to overcome this problem, a starting point is to identify the main concepts involved in Language Processing subject and to consider that a person learns when he/she is involved in a process. The authors argue that motivation is a crucial factor to engage students in the course work, and it is highly dependent on the languages used to work on during the course. Therefore, they discuss the characteristics that a language should have to be a motivating case study. The authors think that LP teachers should be very careful in their choices and be astute in the way they explore the underlying grammars along the course evolution.