Педагогические науки./2.Проблемы подготовки специалистов.

Olga Krayevska

Vinnytsia National Agrarian University, Ukraine

Subject Integration in Communicative Competence Formation of Future Managers-Agrarians

Efficient formation of communicative competence of managers-agrarians has gained immense importance for their future development and career. In the modern world of constant, intense and essential communication, managers’ communicative competence significantly influences the effectiveness of the business activity of the company they work for. According to Patrick Forsyth, the key tasks of a manager are planning, recruitment and selection, organizing, training and development, motivation and control [1]. No wonder, up to 90 % of a manager’s work time is spent for communication.

Successful communicative competence formation of future managers-agrarians is an especially important task of higher education for countries with rich agrarian potential and human resources. Communicative activity of managers of this type is becoming more various, intense and important, hence it needs substantial preliminary study and preparation. The very nature of communicative competence implies integration of knowledge and skills from different fields: linguistics, psychology, culturology etc. In modern conditions, when higher education is aimed at supplying professional training in different subjects, communicative competence formation process demands substantial subject integration.

Communicative competence definition and structure have been disputable problems for quite a long time. Communicative competence is generally defined as “a term in linguistics which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately” [2].

Dell Hymes, the scholar who coined the term “communicative competence”, defined it as “communicative form and function in integral relation to each other”. Vesna Bagaric and Jelena Mihaljevic Djigunovic in their article “Defining communicative competence” [3] clearly signify difficulties and controversies in communicative competence definition process since late 1960. Nowadays, the interest to communicative competence formation process has even intensified under the influence of global communication and the disputes became more practical rather than theoretic.

All the attempts of scientists to structure and generalize the notion “communicative competence” collide with objective differences in communicative competence structure of workers of different fields, difference in correlation between the elements of communicative competence structure, as well constant change of the elements in the process of intense development of global communication. In these conditions, it is hardly possible to find one universal magic recipe of effective communication and communicative competence formation. Yet it is vital for business efficiency to study and define communicative competence of different specialists, like managers-agrarians, and to clarify favorable conditions of their communicative competence formation in the process of professional training.

We believe that subject integration in communicative competence formation of future managers-agrarians is the key to solving the problem of successful formation of the competence. By integrating such subjects like foreign language, native language, psychology, culturology and even some topics of professional economic courses we supply natural unification of knowledge and skills which will be connected in future professional activity. Moreover, integration significantly improves educational process as it enables coordination of educational material and economy of time, on the one hand, as well as extension and deepening of some courses by means of saved time and effort, on the other hand. However, before integrating some courses the notion and types of subject integration should be thoroughly studied.

Integration in education is approached today, according to Kozlovska I., as “the process of convergence and connection of sciences, which operates along with the process of differentiation, which is the highest form of embodiment of relations between subjects to a new level of learning” [4]. According to Kozlovska I., there are three levels of integration in education: interdisciplinary connections, synthesis of interrelated and interacting sciences in the basic discipline and an integrative holistic system (as an integrative course).

Appliance of integrative approach proves to be especially effective on the second level of integration as synthesis of interrelated and interacting sciences in the basic discipline. For that purpose, it is appropriate, for example, to combine the process of learning a foreign language and those aspects of psychology that are directly necessary for communication and communicative competence formation. Using such techniques of psychological communication training as “citation of a partner”, “positive statements technique”, “informing technique” and “an interesting story technique” at foreign language classes, for example, enables future managers to learn and immediately apply psychological and linguistic aspects of communication naturally, as they are bound and indissoluble in their professional activity.

The search for subject integration possibilities and their usage turn out to be productive and lead to real improvement of managers-agrarians’ communicative competence formation process.

References

1. Patrick Forsyth. How to Motivate People. London: Kogan Page, 2006.

2. Communicative competence. Retrieved from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_competence

3. Defining communicative competence. Retrieved from hrcak.srce.hr/file/42651

4. Козловська І. М. Теоретико-методологічні аспекти інтеграції знань учнів професійної школи (дидактичні основи). – Львів: Світ, 1999. – 302 с.