OPTIMIZING WRITTEN CONTROL OF KNOWLEDGE, ABILITIES AND SKILLS ON THE SUBJECT “ENGLISH FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES”(ENGLISH FOR TECHNICAL SPECIALTIES)

Abstract

The article defines the notion of written control of “English for Technical Specialties” as that which may reflect the professional technical English language knowledge, abilities and skills in reading, listening, and writing and to some extent speaking. It is noted that the written control reflects objective achievement results, while the individual approach is absent, which is a drawback due to standardized evaluation criteria. Another disadvantage of written control is students’ cheating possibility. It is outlined that the written control is an optimum kind of the professional lexical units’ knowledge control as well as the grammar constructs and stylistic peculiarities of technical English. The authors define the following recommended types of written control exercises: the productive, reproductive and partially reproductive ones: multiple-choice test, filling in test, regrouping test, sentence transformation test, correcting mistakes, constructed answer test, “question – answer” test and the “translation” test. The authors recommend to group within one test sheet exercises, starting with the reproductive and partially reproductive, with the productive ones in the end. The article establishes basic principles of written control: hierarchy, management and system implementation. Due to the conducted literature data analysis and authors’ personal teaching experience the optimum written test structure has been defined as that including 4-5 tasks, consisting of 5 points each, which include control of lexical units on the theme, context of the theme, grammar constructions and the abilities and skills of listening or professional writing. The authors offer to make up the written tasks bank, grouping various tasks into various test subkinds, to be approved by the English tutors’ Council, Department of Foreign Languages or even the Faculty.