Esp Teaching in Higher Education -Challenges and Issues

Abstract

Higher engineering education aimed at training competitive professionals, intelligent, having an inquiring mind, willing to fulfill their potential, being able to meet the requirements of modern production and society, presupposes formation of future engineers' professional competency. Learning foreign languages at technical universities is mostly regarded as a means of developing students' soft skills. The particular interest of this research lay in considering the potential of foreign languages in forming future engineers' professional competency. The interrelations between professional competency and foreign language professional communicative competence are analyzed in the article. To consider the structure of foreign language professional communicative competence, an activity-and-reflexive approach was applied instead of a traditionally used linguo-didactic one. Great attention was paid to the assessment criteria of students' work. The research involved theoretical analysis, questioning, qualitative and quantitative research methods. The article describes the results revealing conditions of successful formation of professional competency while teaching foreign languages.