Abstract
The modern world requires engineering specialists with excellent hard skills as well as soft skills that contribute to better communication, creativity, and self-realisation of a person. The authors discovered that modern educational standards are starting to focus on soft skills development, proposing requirements for educational programs that contain competencies covering soft skills. To fulfil such needs, there is the productive method of foreign language teaching that implies interactive technologies and masters foreign language communicative competence and soft skills at once. Therefore, the study aimed at developing a technology of soft skills development in engineering foreign language education using the productive method and checking its effectiveness. The authors designed a questionnaire and investigated engineering students’ opinions on a need to develop soft skills, which revealed high relevance of the topic, and the possibility of their development while studying a foreign language, which proved the productive method’s prospects. Based on findings received and literature analysed, we implemented case studies, problem-based learning, and essay writing in the technology and designed assessment criteria. Testing of the technology was performed by a pedagogical experiment, where qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. To critically analyse the results, we used Cronbach’s alpha, which revealed good reliability of the questionnaire, and t-test showed high efficiency of the technology that improved students’ soft skills.
Highlights
There is a high demand for engineering personnel who obtain hard skills, which are theoretical knowledge and practical skills related to a specialty of a person, and soft skills consisting of communication skills, creative thinking, analytical and managerial skills, and interpersonal skills and qualities
We examined how certain interactive technologies can be applied for soft skills development in a higher school, but there was no correlation between the productive method, foreign language teaching and soft skills development, our research question is to check whether the productive method can be useful for soft skills development in engineering foreign language education
To implement the development of soft skills within higher education, it is necessary to base it on the typology of soft skills, and on the requirements for the results of studying higher education programs, which in Russia are formulated in the Federal State Educational Standard of Higher Education
Summary
There is a high demand for engineering personnel who obtain hard skills, which are theoretical knowledge and practical skills related to a specialty of a person, and soft skills consisting of communication skills, creative thinking, analytical and managerial skills, and interpersonal skills and qualities. Scientists reveal how much training at the university contributed to the formation of these skills and come to the following conclusions: discrepancy between the significance of soft skills for graduates and their formation is more than 10%; activities carried out by the university to adapt and socialize the personality of students contributed to the formation of only basic communication skills; only 10% of the study time in universities is devoted to the development of soft skills [2,5,6,7] All this confirms the fact that currently, training at the university level is more aimed at the development of professional knowledge and hard skills. There is a need to clarify the concept of soft skills and find useful methods of their development within the higher education
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