Thesaurus as a Tool for Teaching Abstract Writing to Graduate Students

Abstract

This study, grounded on the need in the permanent development of competences formation methodologies to meet employers’ demand, presents an effective didactic tool for teaching ESP to graduate students. The paper describes thesaurus modelling principles applied to teaching foreign language terminology to students of Welding Production Technology and Equipment at Togliatti State University. It was discovered that semantic relations between thesaurus items correlate with relations between research methodology components. Then the authors propose three stages which enable educators both to organize their term management work and to train a metalinguistic competence in scholarly abstract writing. The first stage contains two algorithms of building a thesaurus based on inductive and deductive methods of thinking accordingly. At the second stage the semantic relations between thesaurus items are used to determine methodology components of a bachelor’s thesis by means of correlating these semantic relations to the relations between research methodology components. At the final stage common cliches for abstract writing are introduced to students.