Conceptual compression of a text as a component of communicative competence

Abstract

The article presents an example how to work with students on the text conceptual compression. The skill of compression and transferring the information
 of a text is a solid part of communicative competence and it seems to be crucial
 in the process of verbal communication including professional conversation.
 There was conducted a beta testing among the 1st year university students in order to evaluate the skills to compress and transfer information. The examination
 shows that the secondary school graduates do not perform well being asked to
 compress the information of a text, they are not able to use adequate ways to
 transform the texts, the final text product does not include all vital conceptual details. The subject group of students was offered a special training, which included a number of exercises aimed on teaching to compress texts. The article
 also includes the designed course which was applied. As the result of such a focused instruction on text compression studies, the students learned how to highlight the key topics and to use the needed ways of compression. What is more,
 the final products appeared to be more logical. Hence the proposed research
 leads to the conclusion that not only such specially designed training is vitally
 needed, but also that the designed by the researchers exercises are effective.