Abstract
<p>This article deals with the motives and attitudes of students with nonlinguistic major studying English as a foreign language in a higher educational institution. Nowadays, having a good command of English both oral and written is a prerequisite for a successful promotion in every field, students must learn how to communicate by means of a foreign language on a very high level. The aim of this paper is to show the efficiency of reading activities for motivating students during their studies, as well as to emphasize the relevance of reading authentic newspaper articles. Significance of the work is contained in finding and using new methods and teaching means for improvement of students’ competence in reading in a foreign language. Results of the empirical study conducted by the authors represent evaluation of authentic newspaper articles’ potential for reading comprehension in a classroom and, furthermore, demonstrate effectiveness of this method for EFL and ESL teaching. In other words, the use of authentic text materials from modern Russian and English newspapers with their adaptation and application of various types of communicative tasks before and after the process of reading has been proved to increase the motivation of students to learn English. Reading newspaper articles, therefore, has been also detected to be an effective tool for development of intercultural competences. The experimental part of the investigation was conducted in the Kazan Federal University (Russia), and consisted of a questionnaire that was filled in anonymously by various groups of students, answers to which helped to determine the popularity of reading newspapers among students.</p>
Highlights
Nowadays a lot of attention is paid to the training of highly qualified professionals in higher education
To evaluate the potential impact of using authentic online reading sources for advancement of the students, a questionnaire (Appendix 1) was prepared that was filled in by several groups of students of the Kazan Federal University (Russia) with technical and IT major, where English is included in a core curriculum for first two to three years of education. 56 students took part in an anonymous poll, where the most of them are at the age of (30 participants) and years old (12 participants) as they are in their 2nd semester of a general Bachelor program
It can be stated that the responses of the students to the first question, where they had to rate the frequency of reading online newspapers on a scale from 1 to 6, fully met researchersinitial expectations
Summary
Nowadays a lot of attention is paid to the training of highly qualified professionals in higher education. The economic situation of Russia requires new rules of business relations on a level of a state. There is an exact problem of training a new generation of professionals who can conduct business with foreign companies in the business world. Every year in the higher education requirements for proficiency in foreign languages increase. This is due to the need to combine our state standards with international trends of progress. The main task of teaching a foreign language is to organize educational services in accordance with the level of the famous ancient universities. The educational institutions actively apply the latest technologies of language training. We cannot forget the initial level of language preparation of students (Yahin, Sakaeva, & Burenkova, 2016a: 223)
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