Increased requirements of employers forced researchers to pay attention to the lack of academic knowledge and professional competence, so-called hard skills, when applying for a job. Multitasking has become a defining trend in all professional fields, which confronts professionals with problems that do not have a solution algorithm. We need special mechanisms for adapting the employees to constant challenges and additional knowledge and skills, the function of which is performed by soft skills. This article focuses on the development of creative and critical thinking as one of the categories of soft skills, as it is the style of thinking that determines the level of success in the professional sphere. Today, with the development of the information society, the problem of understanding a large amount of information, its processing, correct interpretation by students and further adaptation for application in professional field is a crucial one. Communication in the field of science and technology is realized in the form of discourse, which actualizes the development of future graduates creative thinking through the ability formation to explicate meaningful content, decode and deverbalize in the process of perceiving, understanding and interpreting professionally relevant information when working with scientific and technical discourse. The discipline of "Foreign Language" provides the necessary environment for developing soft skills working with the discourse in question. In this case reading is a tool for obtaining information by comparison, comparing data, analyzing the information received, highlighting the main and secondary information, establishing causality, assessing. The hermeneutic approach to the development of soft skills ensures the optimal conditions to activate mental operations responsible for effective perception and further adaptation of the information received for professional purposes. Practical part of the research is to compile a set of tasks for working with text material, which will ensure the information understanding and interpretation through certain reading strategies stimulating mental activity.

Currently the relevance of the development of students’ universal competencies (soft skills) along with the formation of their professional (hard skills) skills is determined by employers’ requirements, rapidly changing labor market and terms of professional activity. The article deals with the students of technical majors soft skills developmentin course foreign language instruction. The authors analyze the essence and the concept of soft skills in frames of foreign language university training. The authors highlight that soft skills development occurs through focused and purposeful work on critical, system and analytical thinking skills. A special course of the discipline "Foreign Language" is designed by the authors. The preliminary results of the experimental work demonstrate that positive dynamics of skills development has been observed.

Introduction. The development of the business sphere, scientific and technological progress set the pace of engineering education modernization and stimulate the search for the optimal and close to real working conditions ways of improving and enhancing professional competences and soft skills of university graduates. Interdisciplinarity has become a professional fields trend comprising enormous potential to foster the research, implement its results into practice and facilitate students’ soft skills development.Materials and Methods. The study is based on the analysis and comparison of domestic and foreign experience on the problem of the research; pedagogical observation of the educational process; study and generalization of pedagogical experience; experimental work.Results. The interdisciplinary project “Hardware and software complex of augmented reality as a means of learning a foreign language” was carried out with students of different specialties on the bases of Samara State Technical University. The rationale for this project choice is related to the relevance of the information technologies use in educational process and the need to learn a foreign language for professional purposes. These conditions make us think of creating the innovative methodological support of educational process. Considering the development of students’ soft skills, special attention was paid to group dynamics, role functions, leadership, as well as environmental and context factors. Interdisciplinary interaction terms were identified: stable working relationships which help develop communication literacy skills; finding the effective conflict solution that stimulates thinking skills; role and time distribution for actualizing management and self-management skills; a common goal achieving which is conditioned by the combination of the main soft skills groups of effective thinking skills, communication skills, management and self-management skills.Discussion and Conclusion. Practical work within the interdisciplinary project proved the necessity of students’ soft skills development for achieving success in professional sphere. The most efficient way to better this process is to realize the interdisciplinary interaction due to its potential, represented by its resources, ideas and approaches from different fields, and opportunities for mastering the skills in question.