Возможности иностранного языка в развитии Soft Skills будущих специалистов

Abstract

The changes at the world's labour market of the past decades demand a reconsideration of the education content, technologies and methods of teaching, ways of upbringing, and prove the importance of a deliberate development of future specialists' soft skills as an integrative personality characteristic which is necessary for successful work activities in modern society. This article aims at specifying the content of soft skills as a personality characteristic and searching the pedagogical ways of their development in acquiring professional education. The study was carried out using theoretical (analysis of pedagogical, psychological and sociological literature, synthesis of knowledge on the problem) and experimental (interviewing, conversation, polling, questionnaire, observation of educational process, analysis of learning materials and teaching resources, their experimental application, monitoring of students' soft skills development) research methods. The analysis of literature on the question allowed concluding that the structure of soft skills includes communicative-interactive, creative, reflexive, and cognitive components, and emotional intelligence. Thus, soft skills are an integrative personality characteristic representing a set of communicative, creative, and reflexive skills in combination with emotional intelligence, cognitive skills, and such personal characteristics as flexibility, friendliness, learnability, punctuality, timemanagement, leadership. Academic language disciplines, especially teaching business interaction in foreign language, are particular promising for the development of soft skills due to the diversity of applied activities and interactive methods based on communicative-interactive tasks. These tasks can be classified regarding their difficulty (simple and complex), content (social and professional), cultural barriers (monocultural and cross-cultural), and number of active participants (monologue, dialogue, group); they can be combined and deliberately made up by a teacher according to educational and professional needs. Experimental teaching business interaction with the help of communicative-interactive tasks demonstrated a systemic development of students' interactive and reflexive skills, critical and creative thinking through actualization of their own position in problem situations. The research shows that interactive learning on the basis of communicative-interactive tasks provides opportunities necessary for developing components of soft skills.