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Nowadays, linguists invariably show a great interest in the whole variety of uncodified vocabulary. Researchers view the language as a kind of “mirror” of the processes and transformations taking place in society, since it is in the language that reflects the current state and development of the human community. It is the language and all its lexical composition that most vividly reacts to what is happening in society through transformations and changes in structure and functioning. Non-standard words and expressions are now increasingly serving as means of expressing the positive emotional mood of the author of the statement, and their use in speech contributes to the optimization of communicative interaction in the context of informal interpersonal communication. In modern linguistic literature, as in society as a whole, one can observe an ambiguous attitude towards the problem of active penetration of words and expressions of uncodified vocabulary into various styles of speech, there is no unified approach to assessing the ongoing transformations in determining the place and the function of uncodified vocabulary in the linguistic and communicative space. An attempt is made in the work to identify the features of the functioning and translation of uncodified vocabulary from English into Russian.

The present study focuses on the assessment of vocabulary potential of teacher-created pedagogical materials to use in the class of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) taught to Russian undergraduates, majoring in Chemical Engineering, in a large public technical university. Specifically, the aim of the research is to examine the vocabulary distribution in the collection of course materials in terms of its range, frequency and variety. The motivation behind the study is that ESP instructors often have to rely on their own intuition during the text selection and material development due to the fact that there is the lack of pedagogical materials covering discipline-specific vocabulary of every specialization. ESP instructors teach English first, integrating the presentation of topics from subject matter classes and the major challenge consists in the lack of content-based knowledge of ESP instructors to select the domain vocabulary to L2 learners. Thus, to facilitate customized language acquisition (basic engineering, academic and specialized vocabulary) and to determine the extent to which the vocabulary contained in the texts is specialized and relevant to L2 learners' domain, corpus software "Range" is used to run the analysis. The results suggest that the ESP corpus promotes the acquisition of high frequency English words (the first and the second 1,000), basic engineering and academic vocabulary. The results also demonstrate insufficient level of teacher-created materials for specialized vocabulary development and highlight the need to include texts of varying vocabulary types, and to optimize specialized wordlist.

The article is devoted to the search for ways to test and evaluate students’ vocabulary skills acquisition in practical English classes. Given the topicality of this problem for many teachers, the authors dwell in detail on the choice of testing methods, give recommendations on the compilation of tests, and discuss factors that should be taken into account when choosing a method for evaluating the student’s lexicon.

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