Features of University Teachers’ Communicative-Speaking Competence

Abstract

The article clarifies the specifics and peculiarities of communicative-speaking competence as the key tool of university teachers’ professional communication. The empirical research revealing development of speech communicative means and their influence on professional self-fulfilment is summarised.
 Peculiarities of the modern linguistic politics are also analyzed. The article reveals the essence of three present-day specific conflicts in the field of speech communication, which are related to losses by young generations of linguistic landmarks, violations of ethical aspects of speech communication, dependence on cyberspace, disappearance of understood boundaries between reality and virtuality. Teachers’ professional work is usually accompanied by professional communication, determined by work goals and providing speech-mediated interactions of communicating actors at professional task solving. This is the main means of teachers’ work that cannot be replaced by some other means and practical activities cannot be performed without it. As for its content, such communication is connected with goals and objectives of their professional work: professional training of students as future specialists and social actors. By its nature, professional communication is a specific activity: “activity in activity”. The key means of its implementation is communicative-speaking competence of communicating actors.
 In the broad sense, communicative-speaking competence is specialists’ integral ability to use verbal interactions; it is a defining psychological tool for their communicative-speaking activities.
 The article states that communicative-speaking competence is a leading constituent in teachers’ professional competence because of its importance for social practice and its pedagogical significance for establishing of effective and psychologically equal interactions between teachers and their students. The model of communicative-speech competence, created by us during researching, unites three main groups of skills and abilities: communicative-speaking, social-perceptual and interactive, which are its main structural components. They are characterized by a number of characteristics: they are self-consistent, interdependent and hierarchically organized. As communicative means creating a psychic link between interlocutors, they are of a communicative nature as for their content and form.
 Communicative-speaking competence also has three integral characteristics determining quality of university teachers’ professional interactions: didactic intention, creative orientation and pedagogical flexibility.
 The notion on “professional speaking” or “professional language”, proposed by O.O. Leontiev, means that a teacher possesses thesaurus common with other communicants (a similar system of language, concepts, semantic meanings); has correct, figurative, emotional, stylistically determined speech; corresponding facial expressions, gesticulation, kinetics; numerous verbal and non-verbal strategies and tactics, united in the communicative aspect of interactions.
 Such “professional language” of a specialist in science and education means professional interactions between teachers and students and it is implemented as an intellectual creative activity associated with “intellectual” communication and including “emotional intelligence”. “Intellectual” verbal communication within the educational process means economical, but complete and systematic, transfer of knowledge from its carriers to future specialists.
 The performed research has determined regularities and peculiarities of communicative-speaking competence of professionals in sociological sciences depending on a number of objective and subjective factors: specialists’ ages, their personality, general and special education, compulsory nature of interactions, constant training, a degree of taking into account of modern requirements to a specific profession and, finally, a type of their leading activity.