CHALLENGES OF ESP CLASSES IN WARTIME CONDITIONS

Abstract

The realities that Ukraine faces today, namely, the full-scale war with the imposition of martial law on the territory of the whole country, led to a number of discussions arising around the effective but safe conducting of the education process at universities and other educational establishments and concerned the organization and proper management of the students` learning process. Despite the previous experience of distance and blended learning modes implemented during the Covid 19 period, it should be noted that some aspects of the organization of the educational process require reconsidering, taking into account the new experience of studying in wartime and the need to regard the emotional tension of students, especially those caught up in the temporarily occupied territories. A survey was conducted among the students of the National Technical University of Ukraine "I. Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" with the aim to reveal and analyze the level of technical students` adaptation to learning a foreign language in extreme conditions and the relevance of tools and methods the teachers have been applying on their ESL lessons. Among the outcomes, it`s worth mentioning the non-fading motivation of students to learn foreign language, increased cross-cultural communication, and mostly high-level accommodation to distance learning mode. It was interesting to find out that students expressed unwillingness to discuss war and relevant news in the ESL lessons and are having issues with managing their academic study time. All the results obtained provide the ground for further reconsidering of the curricula to better meet the students' educational needs. Keywords: education in wartime; ESL classes; distance learning; open online courses; synchronous learning; asynchronous learning; teacher’s empathy; cross-cultural communication.