PhD Lazurenko L.A., PhD Shashkina N.I., Druzhinina L.V.
Prydniprovsk State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
CONCERNING THE PROBLEMS OF TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE GROUPS OF MASTERS AND POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS IN TECHNICAL HIGHER EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENTS
The demand for knowing a foreign language has greatly increased for the past years due to its worldwide importance both in social and professional communication. The Bologna process reforms in the system of higher education in Ukraine have caused radical changes in teaching, learning and evaluating the knowledge of a foreign language according to the international standards. The level of our education must correspond to the demands of the Bologna process which includes not only a system of accumulation and transfer of credits, modules and ratings but also lifelong learning, development of personality, improvement of knowledge in all spheres of life.
Learning foreign languages is an indispensable part of the general programme for training future scientists. While determining the programme content for teaching a foreign language in the groups of masters, postgraduate students and applicants we took into consideration the All European Recommendations and the draft programme of the English language for non-linguistic higher education establishments. While learning a foreign language activity-oriented approach has become the main direction in teaching process. It should be resulted in obtaining the ability to read the original foreign literature in speciality and to use the gained information in professional activity, to understand the foreign speech, to make conversation in the foreign language and to report the special problems.
Working out the professionally oriented learning is conducted in the following interconnected directions: determination of the subject content in all types of foreign speech activity and professionally oriented selection of educational material, teaching methods and rational methodic activity technique, their realization on the basis of system activity approach. Special attention is paid to selection of educational material (first of all, to texts), its methodic organization on the basis of thematic cyclic periods while using it in the educational process in succession and accounting for the principles of the text direction sufficiency for forming lexical, grammatical and structural composite speech skills and so on.
The composed programme accounts for the level of knowledge and individual peculiarrities of post graduates, covers main parts of Phonetics and Grammar, the bases for translation of scientific-technical literature, terminology, connected with the speciality and future scientific work as well as certain difficulties in mastering terminology while reading special literature and so on.
The course of foreign language envisages the following lesson forms: class group lessons under supervision of a teacher, self-studying work under supervision of a teacher (with or without using technical aids), individual work of postgraduates and individual teacher’s consultations. Out-of-class types of work include the preparation for making scientific reports in a foreign language on conferences, participation in scientific seminars and circles using the information on scientific research made by the postgraduates, preparing annotations and summaries of scientific literature in speciality.
To derive, evaluate, treat and further use information necessary to a specialist it is necessary to translate correctly special literature from the lexical, grammatical and stylistic points of view. Thus special attention is devoted to the technical translation. Postgraduates have to translate a great amount of special literature (700 000 signs) to be ready for the candidate examination. Knowledge of special terminology is also in the centre of consideration: knowing 500 terms is a must for admission to examination.
Besides the traditional methods of teaching communication methods as well as audio-visual aids from the books published in Great Britain (“English for Engineering”, “International Business English”, “In Company”, “Straightforward”, “Presentations” and others) and computer programmes are widely used in teaching future scientists.
The teaching staff of the Foreign Languages Department of the Prydniprovsk State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture actively works in the field of new technologies and is striving to find the most effective forms of combination of additional means of teaching foreign languages. All this allows to organize the education process on a proper scientific level taking into account the peculiarities of different specialities of Academy. The results of examinations show the expediency of the training programme used in PSACEA.