Педагогические науки/2Проблемы подготовки специалистов

PhD, Samarskaya S.V.

Rostov State University of Economics, Russia

The main tasks of learning foreign language for professional purposes at the postgraduate’s level

The significant changes related to the further integration of Russia into the world community and, in particular, into a single European educational space occurred in today's higher education. These changes have determined the range of fundamentally new challenges facing it. The introduction of master's and postgraduate courses in the general system of higher education (as the second and the third level), giving higher education the "European dimension" (its focus on European values), the implementation of the social role of higher education, its accessibility for everyone, the development of further education (i.e. "education throughout life") promote the development of competitiveness of Russian higher education and provides the greater possibility of individualization of teaching [1].

Mastering the foreign language as a means of business and scientific communication and as a tool for studying and rational use of innovative achievements in the field of international business is becoming one of the basic needs of a dynamically developing modern society. In this regard, the emphasis in the teaching of a foreign language during the postgraduate course is made on the training of professional and scientific communication in a foreign language on a wide profile of economic specialties. This approach assumes a close relationship with other disciplines studied in high school. The method of interdisciplinary connections, providing for the mutual exchange of knowledge and information on various subjects, has become one of the widely used methods in teaching of foreign language. This method can be implemented in such kinds of educational activity as fulfilling joint activities integrating a variety of specialties, participating in various foreign conferences with using communicative skills of language for special purposes, the joint developing of dictionaries and explanations by experts in the different fields of knowledge.

So the postgraduate course has the twofold task: to train highly qualified specialists in the professional fields as well as training of clever research personnel; that’s why this task requires the acquiring of scientific knowledge and mastering scientific methods and systematic approach for solving professional problems.

 Universities are given the right to determine about 80% of the content of the three-year program of professional postgraduate’s training, since it is the third level of education in higher school. The successful development of mastering the foreign language during the first (bachelor) course, its further advancement at the second level (the master’s course) should bring the communicative professional competence in foreign languages to such level at the postgraduate course that that allows to be engaged in a wide range of creative scientific activities in the chosen profession.

A graduate of this course should be widely erudite, be able to use the methodology of scientific research, modern information technologies, methods of obtaining, processing and recording scientific information, and be able to speak foreign language at an advanced and enhanced level [3]. This level is supposed to be the level of foreign language of professional communicative competence, which is characterized by the access to a wide range of language tools for the fluent communication on various professional and scientific topics without having some time for preparation.

At this level the main objective of the course "Foreign language for professional communication" is to develop competencies that are necessary for practical mastering the language of some definite specialty for its active usage in professional and scientific communication and to improve the quality of using foreign language sources. It is necessary to teach postgraduates to express their thoughts orally and in written form using the professional vocabulary, to do it logically and with true arguments, to summarize and render foreign-language articles correctly, to analyze the resulting information in a foreign language and to compose surveys on a specialized field.

However, the given amount of auditorium time in the teaching process is not enough to accomplish this task. So it is necessary, first of all, to revise the previously acquired skills. One of the ways for optimizing the content and structure of the educational process in the postgraduate course is its module organization which allows to ensure that the content of teaching foreign language for professional communication meets the requirements of the labor market and occupations as well as the needs of postgraduates for professional training and research in its fully extent. In this course of studying the most important are the following modules: the module of intensive grammar language course, the module of training of pronunciation and listening, the module teaching how to render and summarize professionally-oriented and scientific texts, the module for training written scientific communication skills.

First of all, taking into consideration multi-level training and a break in learning a foreign language, postgraduates may be offered an intensive course on grammar of a foreign language, with special attention to the peculiarities of professional and scientific style. Grammar should be viewed not as a goal but as an additional tool for transferring and designing the ideas by means of another language.

A complete and successful oral professional and scientific communication, the correct presentation of the results of its activity is impossible without the proper pronunciation. The module for training pronunciation and listening on the basis of authentic general scientific and professional texts, including specially selected audio and video materials, multimedia tutorials, training manuals helps to cope with this task.

The further object of learning foreign languages for professional communication is to develop skills for working with the original foreign-language literature on the specialty, and in particular, to develop the skills of rendering the written surveys of the scientific articles and professional texts [2]. In their everyday practice many professional specialists often should make a summary in a foreign language, present materials that contain valuable information orally or in written form. It is also common practice to publish scientific articles in journals and thematic collections in their native language with the abstract outlining their core content in another language. However, in order to learn to understand the literature in the chosen field or profile and to communicate on professional topics it is necessary to acquire a certain amount of specialized vocabulary saturated with terms and professionalisms. Therefore, this module should be focused on replenishment of the vocabulary and performing the tasks on drawing up a glossary for the profile category.

At the first stage of presentation of the special vocabulary it is important to use such a property of the scientific terminology as its consistency that allows you to introduce the vocabulary not as isolated lexical units but as a system of interrelated and interdependent terms covering specific professional field and the relevant separate branch of science [2]. The use of authentic vocational-oriented materials for the teaching of reading also has a number of positive points. Firstly, these texts have pragmatic significance (they are action-oriented). Secondly, the authentic texts are full of social and cultural facts and realities taking place in the professional field and illustrating verbal behavior of specialists within a given lingvo-society. Thirdly, such texts are diverse in styles and genres and function in business communication. It helps to stimulate cognitive activity of students and increase their motivation to mastering business communication in English.

So the conclusion can be made that learning a foreign language for professional communication in high school of economics at the Master's graduate level should have a multipurpose character, where the main objective is the formation of the high school graduates’ ability to function as subjects of international economic and educational space, to implement active intercultural communication in the framework of their professional and scientific activities.

Литература:

1. Plaksiy S. The quality of higher education. - M .: 2003. – 196 p.

2. Stepanova M. Teaching Business English in non-linguistic university at postgraduate course// Business Foreign Language: Proceedings. - Vol. 4. Materials XXXIX ational Philological Conference (18 March 2010). St. Petersburg .: LLC "Kultinformpress", 2010. - 51-54pp.

3. The sample program in foreign languages for universities of non-language specialties .- M .: Moscow State Linguistic University, 2007.-22.