Іноземні мови (May 2019)
Current trends in teaching technical English at tertiary schools
Abstract
Today, there is an urgent need to review the existing methods of teaching technical English at tertiary schools and develop the new methods with the aim of students’ intercultural foreign language training and promoting their competitiveness on the European and world labour markets. Information technologies (IT) have become one of the most demanded modern technical majors, that is why 177 tertiary schools in Ukraine carry out training of engineers specialising in IT. On the basis of the analysis conducted by the author, several crucial problems of intercultural foreign language teaching for occupational purposes have been singled out. First and foremost, foreign language teaching conditions at Ukrainian universities along with the existing models of the educational process organisation do not allow students of tertiary schools to master foreign languages for occupational purposes properly, and as a consequence, they do not obtain the required by the national curriculum B2 level as Bachelors and C1 level as Masters. The present system of teaching technical English at Ukrainian tertiary schools should be reformed in the long run. Secondly, IT-engineers lack professional communicative competence enhancement after foreign language university course completion. As a result, it is necessary to alter, on the one hand, technical English teaching content with the view to include socio-cultural and psychological aspects into it. And on the other hand, the existing teaching methods and techniques should be improved, namely the experiential types of educational activities that simulate real situations of every day professional communication of IT-engineers in English should be introduced.
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