Abstract:

The report is supposed to focus on the blended English for specific purposes teaching methodology to develop students’ research skills in a foreign language. The blended LSP course for lawyers-to-be is taken as an example.
Mastering a LSP has become one of key requirements for those professionals who want to collaborate efficiently with their foreign peers in the multicultural professional settings at the age of cross cultural and IT globalization.
The nature of digital society plays a crucial role in building up-to-day educational paradigms. The concept of blended teaching has emerged paving the way to a branch of pedagogy empowered by digital technologies (Thorne 2003).
The current trends in such paradigms developments imply IT integration in LSP training that has to be reflected in the relevant curriculum design, educational aids design, teaching techniques and tasks for students.
What is more the modern paradigms for university education have to ground on the knowledge triangle concept (ET 2020) that requires interaction of such social activity domains as education, research and innovation.
Thus, the methodology of teaching LSP to university students has to be revised through and renovated from the angle of bridging the gap between education and research.
The goal can be reached if specialized IT that professionals used in the daily routine at work (Atabekova 2009) are integrated in the blended LSP course design.
What concerns teaching a foreign language for lawyers-to-be such specialized IT include legal concordances, parallel corpora of legal texts, semantic map technology, legal encyclopedia and dictionaries on-line, legal video/audio sources, and on-line translation memory technologies.
What can to bridge the gap between education and research through blended LSP course is a new blended LSP methodology.
The traditional blended LSP methodology supposes that most of the sources and technologies mentioned above are used to read, listen, reproduce and translate texts from on-line sources, to arrange tasks to train specialized vocabulary and syntax structures of specialized texts in the foreign language under study.
Nevertheless a new blended LSP methodology envisages that such sources were used to train students to conduct academic research in the a foreign language.
A blended LSP training has to be viewed as a tool for students to enhance the boundaries of cross cultural academic research in a specialized professional setting, to deepen the overall scientific analysis level.
Such an approach requires a specific set of tasks that should focus on comparative approach to specialized scientific concepts definition, comparative approach to analyzing specialized text that are taken from parallel corpora, comparative approach to evaluating data from different on-line dictionaries and encyclopedia, from legal concordances, etc.
Such an approach requires a new technology to design education aids that would meet the above outlined requirements. Such an approach requires specific trainers’ competences and a new understanding of the curriculum design in terms of courses continuity and succession

Keywords:

Teaching Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), blended teaching, IT for foreign language teaching, the gap between education and research.