Comparative evaluation of grammatical phenomena among the different specialty students

Abstract

The article considers the results of a survey of technical and humanitarian specialty students in one of the non-linguistic universities in Ukraine with the following goal: to determine how the systems for assessing grammatical phenomena differ/coincide among students whose specialties are different in nature – technical and humanitarian: engineering specialties (electrical engineering and radio-electronic) 60 students; humanitarian specialties (psychology and sociology) 26 students. Such a selection will further indicate the differences in methodological approaches when presenting grammatical material to students of both technical and humanitarian specialties. The chosen grammatical topic is “Degrees of comparison of English adjectives.” The examples, used in the survey, occur in a text corpus of one of the areas of scientific and technical discourse – “Electrical Engineering”. The text corpus was compiled on the basis of articles taken from UK and US scientific journals on this field of technology. The presence of a text corpus made it possible to compile a frequency list of adjectives that were used in the texts not only in accordance with grammatical rules, but also in violation of the rules explained in classical English grammar books. The methods applied in the article were as follows: statistical, quantitative, contextual, expert assessment methods. The performed survey showed which elements in training methodology should be used for students both engineering and humanitarian to understand and accumulate the grammatical information.