PROFESSIONAL-ORIENTED ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING TO THE SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS OF INFORMATION SYSTEM SPECIALITY

Abstract

This article describes the current state of the formation of foreign language professional-communicative competence of IT students at International Information Technology University (IITU) and teaching English for professional purposes (EPP) using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This work outlines the purpose of teaching English language as the development of students' communicative skills, which means the development of practical knowledge of English language. The analysis of EPP teaching methods related to its usage in oral and written communication, both in the process of future professional activity and for further self-education is given in this work as well. It is proved that the main advantage of using ICT in teaching professional oriented English is the shift of emphasis from traditional verbal ways of transmitting information to audiovisual methods. The article offers a set of exercises using digital educational resources in teaching professional oriented English course. An experiment which was carried out with twenty-seven students who were studying offline is presented in the work. There were two STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) groups who were studying professional oriented English language course in this study. According to the academic calendar of the course, they had EPP classes three hours a week and they had to complete some activities using educational tech tools, such as Padlet, Microsoft Teams, Socrative, blogs, etc. After completing the tasks, an online survey was conducted, and students had to leave their feedback on the usage of tech tools while learning professional oriented English language. This article also provides an overview of student performance in a continuous rating without midterm exams. The analysis of the study results confirms the correctness of the chosen methodology to achieve the objectives of the curriculum, and the usage of practical methods in teaching EPP make learning at the university didactically effective and valuable.