MINDFULNESS-BASED FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Life in the modern world is characterized by incessant political and economic transformations, which leads to changes in the functioning of all social institutions. In the sphere of education there exists a search for effective instruction technologies, which could take into consideration individual features, interests and needs of every learner. Foreign language education is a traditional leader in realization of innovative approaches, methods and means of teaching and learning. Formative assessment, the ideas of which existed in domestic psychology and pedagogy many decades ago, is now becoming more popular in Russia due to the influence of western countries. The benefits of formative assessment are focus on the learners, their needs and learning intentions, strengths and weaknesses. Formative assessment is meant for learning, it is integrated in the educational process. However, despite all the posi-tive effects of formative assessment schools and higher educational establishments encounter difficulties in the process of its realization. For the successful organization of formative assessment it is not enough to select suitable tools, for nearly any tool can be used for formative assessment with the right approach of a teacher. Thereby, the difficulties lie in the necessity to change a teacher’s professional perspective and way of thinking. In the framework of our research we put forward the idea of using mindfulness as a basis for formative assessment. Mindfulness, which has proved its effectiveness in tackling various psychological disorders, is becoming more popular in pedagogy. The components of mindfulness (attention, self-regulation, self-reflection, empathy, openness to novelty, value-sense orien-tation) enable a teacher to reveal negative patterns in professional activity for devising new and effective strategies of foreign language teaching.