Педагогические  науки/2.Проблемы подготовки специалистов

Ph.D. in Pedagogics, Associate Professor Muratbekova A.M.

S.Seifullin KazATU, Astana

Developing students’ communicative competence

Today’s economic and industrial development shows a growing need in efficient specialists, hence there is a high demand to higher educational institutions to train the like. In this regard, one of the objectives of universities is to develop future experts’ communicative competence.

In recent years, pedagogics has made a wide use of the term ‘competence’, which is defined as a set of psychic abilities and a psychological state that gives way for independent, efficient and up-to-level fulfillment of responsibilities and work, i.e. it is mainly evaluation of professional abilities. Furthermore, competence or efficiency in a certain job is also viewed as a set of knowledge that allows one to express a substantiated and well-grounded opinion or reason about an object or a phenomenon.

The notion of competence is connected to fulfillment of complex practical tasks and is shown as an integrative phenomenon in education being a synthesis of cognitive, informative, ethic, social and communicative components.

В.М.Шепель in his book «Управленческая антропология» defines ‘competence’ as follows: “…acquisition of knowledge, experience and professionalism necessary for efficient fulfillment of one’s responsibilities” [1, 30]. Based on this definition, the essence of ‘competence’ can be summarized as follows: the skillful use of theoretical knowledge in practice, strive for self-development and experience or, in other words, being ‘highly efficient in one’s job’.

In scientific pedagogic literature, the notion of ‘professionalism’ is considered to be an equivalent to that of ‘efficiency’. Professional development of a specialist is characterized by his/her fulfillment of various responsibilities and, as a result, by a wider range of activities.

Professional competence is an integral characteristics composed of three constituents: cognitive, operational and axiomological.

Cognitive characteristics is certain knowledge available, while operational characteristics is activities total that make it possible to fulfill one’s responsibilities based on the knowledge; axiomological parameter involves one’s ability to reason and to make plans for the future.

The source of one’s competence and incompetence is the same: it is the person’s stable emotional state.

“Competence is a general evaluative term that denotes one’s capability to fulfill one’s activities “being efficient in work. As a rule, it is used in reference to people of social and professional status and denotes their level of knowledge according to the specific amount of responsibilities and complex issues they solve” [2, 54].

In Kazakh the notion of competence is used in the meaning 'ability of a person to take decisions, make generalizations and conclusions.’

This ability appears when a person is knowledgeable, informed and experienced. That is, competence is of accumulative character since a person becomes competent by acquiring knowledge and experience. Therefore, the notion of competence is understood by domestic and foreign experts to be a result of education [3, 7].

Still, of significance is the person’s ability to apply his/her knowledge. Today the education system of Kazakhstan is undergoing enormous changes, among them the use of Kazakh in scientific and technical fields with an aim to enhance the prestige of the official language. One of the ways to put it into practice is to develop the learner’s communicative capacity. At present, information technologies have penetrated everywhere and no one can deny that this has more advantages than disadvantages. However, information gets to people in different ways and in these ways the system of knowledge is formed. People who find information in the Internet mostly use one-way channel of communication, with no discussion about the information provided and received. Naturally, this process does not lead to increasing the level of communication in the society.

Knowledge is to be accumulated and, then, be used in practice. In this regard, the most essential for a specialist is to be able to communicate with others. The process of teaching theory should be carried out at the theoretical level of cognition; practical skills are formed on the basis of theoretical knowledge. All the aforementioned show the necessity of studying communicative competence development strategies in teaching the official language.

The system of traditional education prevalent at the universities of Kazakhstan does not supply students with communicative competence necessary for applying knowledge obtained in communication, i.e. his/her knowledge fails to become a tool of cognition and, consequently, it does not meet the demand of time.

It is pointless to doubt that students who specialize in technical fields tend to obtain knowledge concerning their majors. However, they need to be communicatively competent in order to apply their knowledge in practice. In addition, they are to be able to express their ideas in the official language. It is crucial for them to understand this responsibility and strive for knowledge now that terminology of science and technical fields is being translated into Kazakh,

Competencies in the Kazakh language based on principles of teaching the language to foreign speakers are as follows:

- communicative competence is the appropriate solution of different communicative tasks by students on the basis of language means, i.e. formation of their own vision and perception via the Kazakh language;

- language competence is profound knowledge of language (phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, ethnolinguistics, etc.) and appropriate use of this knowledge by learners in different situations (correct orthography, style, etc.);

- linguistic-and-ethnocultural competence is the knowledge of national customs and traditions, national values, speech manners and the development of the latter. At the same time, it includes understanding of the fact that culture of the nation is manifest in language.

Communicative competence is evaluated by the students’ ability to appropriately use their language skills in different social, professional situations. Competence in the Kazakh language is formed via listening, reading, speaking and writing.

After Listening a student develops his/her skills of aural comprehension, of rendering briefly, in detail, systematically the information or the main points of the text heard.

With Reading a student learns to read correctly with appropriate intonation and comprehension of the text, to read fast and simultaneously work with the given textbooks and literature.

Speaking presupposes that a student is trained to appropriately use language materials and clearly express his/her thoughts.

In Writing a student is to produce written texts in different registers and genres, write down texts he/she has listened to or read (specifying, shortening, focusing on main points, giving details).

To sum up, communicative competence is the linguistic focus of the teaching process, one of the activities meant to develop speaking skills and one of the main principles of teaching a language as a tool of communication. Unfortunately, language learners very frequently fail to connect words with each other although their knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar is really good. There are several reasons for this, in particular:

- Kazakh is turning into the language to learn, i.e. though language course participants learn the theory and rules, the latter are not applied in practice;

- most exercises on producing dialogues and monologues are done in the same way. They have turned into a routine to such an extent that students instantaneously use the phrases they have learnt by heart and practised quite often before;

- technical terms are used within a very narrow circle of communication and consequently tend to be forgotten within a short period of time. Since terminology taught at University is not used at workplace, it does not seem necessary to be learnt.

At present, much attention is paid to training young specialists including those in agrotechnical field due to the fact that:

- previously specialists were brought up with the Soviet ideology, they do not fully realize the significance of the official language and communicate in Russian. At present, the society needs engineers able to communicate their ideas clearly in Kazakh;

- terminology used in the Kazakh language is to cover the technical fields as well, therefore intended specialists are being required to fill in official documents and papers concerning their specialization in very good and correct Kazakh;

- conditions are being created for Kazakh to cease being a target language in translation and become a tool of communication and expressing one’s ideas. In order to meet these requirements, future specialists are to acquire the advanced level of proficiency in the official language, i.e. they are to have developed communicative competence.

Generally, developing future engineers’ communicative competence is the demand of time. One of the requirements to the intended specialist is communicative culture, whose main criteria are: creating psychologically favourable conditions for the conversation, trying to produce a good impression on the co-speaker, being able to subdue one’s negative emotions, having skills to react to the co-speaker’s impoliteness, knowing how to ask and answer questions, knowing how to refute one’s arguments, developing the skill of intent listening to the other speaker, being able to conduct a peaceful conversation with people of different psychological types [4, 8].

The development of communicative culture requires:

- knowledge of language at all its levels (phonetics, vocabulary, grammar);

- ability to use expressive language means;

- development of speaking and writing skills;

- continuous enrichment of one’s vocabulary;

- knowledge of new terms and their appropriate use.

Moreover, successful interaction between different people presupposes the following: achieving the objective set, ability to listen to the communicator, ability to plan, i.e. to plan beforehand what is going to be said during the conversation with an aim to achieve one’s objective, self-confidence, ability to forecast possible contradictions’, ability to find a way out, ability to use one’s knowledge when necessary, capacity to convince the co-speaker, etc.

The development of these features in the education process within University is directly related to developing one's activeness. Only an active person is interested in self-educating and in developing his/her communicative competence significant in interaction.

Furthermore, communicative competence and culture is a constituent of professional and personal qualities, identity and manners; it helps a specialist to meet demands of the job. In this respect, of special importance are the young specialist’s language style and communicative culture.

A competent specialist is a professional who is able to logically and systematically put into practice the theoretical knowledge obtained.

References

1. Горчакова В.Г. Формула профессионализма / Челябинск: 1997. - 140 с.

2. Кенжебеков Б.Т. Университет студенттерінің кәсіби құзыреттілігін  қалыптастырудың теориясы мен практикасы. Монография – Астана, 2001. – 274. б.

3. Дюсенбаева А. Мектептегі қоғамдық ұйымдарда оқушылардың менеджерлік құзыреттілігін қалыптастыру. –Алматы, 2010.

4. Баско Ю. Шкарапута Л. Критерии коммуникабельности. // Персонал, № 3, 1998.