e-Skills and Digital Literacy for Foreign Languages Education: Student Case Study in Ukraine

The COVID-19 pandemic induced amplified digitalization measures in the higher education sphere, informed by the need to take quick comprehensive action to achieve the overarching result to transform educational scenarios into interdisciplinary digital, remote, and hybrid frameworks. The consequent functional tasks to meet this challenge are estimated as (1) to activate comprehensive complex skillsets, otherwise latent or underutilized in the educational process; (2) to boost ICT competence and digital literacy of all participants of the educational process, relocated to the computer realm. The study objective is to diagnose and critically review the empirical case of digital skills viral development and application to construe interdisciplinary competencies of students of European and Oriental Languages major programs in Ukraine, employed in the years 2020-2021 due to quarantine measures. The study premise is the identification of various competency principles, derivative of twenty-first-century skills, and projected digital literacy requirements. The survey method and diagnostic analysis of different digital literacy components and e-skills implementation are used to assess the parameters of efficiency of transforming real-life linguistic education practices into the digital and hybrid format. The investigation novelty is in the identification of the interoperability between various groups of applied e-skills and soft skills, instrumental to develop interdisciplinary professional awareness of Foreign Languages students in Ukraine. The study allows detection of challenges for actual and underdeveloped skills (hard, technical, and soft), that participants of the educational process encountered through digital format adaptation in programs of European and Oriental Languages. [For the full proceedings, see ED621892.]