Developing Master’s Students Professional Communicative Skills While Teaching Foreign Languages

Abstract

The article highlights the problem of developing foreign language professional communication of the students pursuing a master’s degree at technical universitites. Even in the global world, learning foreign languages at Russian technical universities has some peculiarities which prevent future engineers from successful interacting and communicating in professional communities. The aim of the article is to analyze the present situation and suggest practical ideas of optimizing the learning process of foreign languages for master’s degree students which presupposes development of foreign language professional communicative skills. The research involved theoretical analysis, questioning, and qualitative and quantitative research methods. To identify the second-year master’s students’ readiness and ability to communicate with their colleagues the researchers conducted a survey among 116 master’s students of the Omsk State Technical University. Interpretation of the results made the authors establish the fact that the majority of technical master’s students have difficulties in discussing their scientific work and presenting scientific findings at international conferences. The article describes the results revealing conditions of successful development of foreign language professional communication while teaching foreign languages, with particular attention on planning and designing an activity-based program of a «Foreign Language for Specific Purposes» course for master’s degree students. The authors came to the conclusion that foreign language professional communicative skills can be successfully formed if the following principles are observed: enhancing complexity of students’ tasks, application of genre approach to teaching foreign languages, integrated development of communicative skills, usage of professional competences while working with foreign language material, activity-and-reflexive approach to development of students’ tasks.