Abstract:

As general aim of the conference is to promote international collaboration in Education and Research in all educational fields and disciplines, the purpose of our participation in it is to inform colleagues about the results of the experiment on language teaching which took place at Moscow state technical university and had been proceeding for three years. According to the program presented to university - leavers, they, after a full - time education on a foreign language subject (English, German, etc.), must be able to communicate with ease enough on their professional sphere. But, the reality is not so optimistic. Today's graduating students are able only to read and translate technical texts with a dictionary. Thus, the task was to analyze, to sort out and define the methods which can be acknowledged as the most effective in a foreign language teaching process at technical universities to enliven the process itself, simultaneously making students be more interested in it and in speaking results of their own. The results of the experiment showed that the dominating position nowadays belongs to collaborative and problem - based learning. In particular, they are the method of projects and Case - study (or Case analysis) when students can:
1) practise such important skills as working without assistance, making decisions, observing, listening and persuading the other participants;
2) relate analysis and action to develop realistic and concrete actions despite the complexity and partial knowledge characterizing the situation being studied;
3) develop a general managerial point of view where responsibility is sensitive to action in a diverse environmental context, etc.
The steps of the experiment, examples of some students' projects (e.g. A car of the future.), the conclusions will be presented while reporting to share our ideas and to get colleagues' responses, sugestions.

Keywords:

Problem-based learning, Case-study, method of projects, experiment.