ANALISYS OF THE STATE OF ACADEMIC COMMUNICATIVE TRAINING OF SCIENCE MAJORS AT UKRAINIAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

The requirements to Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Sciences include not only in-depth knowledge of disciplinary-specific subjects, but also life-long skills enabling individuals to achieve their career goals and contribute to the solution of global problems facing the community of scientists through effective communication. Today, academic communicative competency of a science graduate involves the knowledge of linguistic standards of communication, mastery of discursive practices typical of the respective disciplinary academic communities and readiness to follow the principles of academic integrity. The purpose of this paper is to study the factual state of academic communicative training offered to science majors at universities of Ukraine and its correspondence to the requirements of the State Standard of Higher Education in this field. General theoretical methods, namely synthesis, analysis, comparison, classification, generalization and specification, have been applied to study the content of the respective State Standards as well as normative documentation of some Ukrainian universities including program curricula, syllabi, course descriptions, teaching guides and instructions, etc. The obtained results reveal that the State Standard of Higher Education in Sciences requires that graduates have the following groups of communicative competences upon completion of Bachelor’s and/ or Master’s programs: cognitive communicative competences, language and rhetoric communicative competences, and adaptive communicative competences. The study of university documentation shows that the current state of academic communicative training is still inadequate because of its chaotic and unsystematic character, but due to growing university autonomy, promotion of “bottom-up” initiatives and new offerings of elective subjects to the curricula the situation might develop a positive tendency in future.