DIGITAL TOOLS IN A MULTILINGUAL EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: RATIONALE FOR AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO THE TRAINING OF A MODERN PROFESSIONAL

Abstract

Problem statement. The professional training of modern specialists increasingly takes place in digitally mediated, multilingual, and intercultural environments. Specialists work with digital sources, cloud services, collaborative platforms, machine translation systems, generative artificial intelligence, and multimodal content. At the same time, digitalization and multilingualism in higher education often develop in parallel rather than in an integrated way: digital courses tend to focus on technological operations, whereas language training is frequently separated from professional tasks. This creates a need to justify an integrated approach in which digital tools and multilingual practices are considered interdependent foundations of professional training.

Materials and methods. The study is theoretical and analytical. It employs the analysis of scholarly and policy-related sources, comparison of approaches to digital and plurilingual competences, categorization of digital tools, conceptual synthesis, and pedagogical modeling.

Results. The article clarifies the concept of a multilingual educational environment as a system of resources, interactions, and activities in which several languages are functionally used for cognition, professional communication, mediation, collaboration, and the creation of a digital product. The functions of digital tools in such an environment are systematized as information-search, communication-collaboration, translation-mediation, productive-creative, adaptive-support, analytical-assessment, and reflective-ethical functions. The study proposes a matrix for the use of digital tools, linking groups of tools with multilingual practices, professional tasks, and learning outcomes. The duality of digitalization and multilingualism is substantiated as a functional interdependence of a digital tool, multilingual activity, a professional task, and reflective verification of the result. The article also identifies pedagogical conditions for implementing the integrated approach: professionally oriented multilingual tasks, functional use of learners’ linguistic repertoires, alignment of digital tools with learning outcomes, critical use of machine translation and generative AI, intercultural interaction, multimodality, accessibility, reflective assessment, teacher readiness, and institutional support.

Conclusions. The integrated digital-multilingual approach is shown to develop not a set of isolated skills, but the ability to act in a complex professional environment in a responsible, linguistically flexible, and technologically grounded way. The study also outlines risks related to digital and linguistic inequality, automation, authorship, confidentiality, assessment validity, and institutional sustainability.