Abstract:

The contemporary social, educational and research environment is characterized by a high level of academic and labour mobility. Specialists from various settings participate in professional congresses, forums and conferences; communicate with the colleagues in foreign languages and can be involved in making lectures, presentations and projects. All these activities assume a high proficiency level of the skills in the oral communication namely in speaking and listening. These skills are usually trained in General English or Kommunikative Deutch. However, the communication in a foreign language for specific purposes differs from the everyday communication and consequently special attention should be drawn to training the corresponding skills in a particular setting.

Some aspects of training speaking skills for specific purposes were already examined by the authors (Belenkova N. CLIL Approach in Foreign Language Speaking Skills Development. Proceedings. International Conference ICT for Language Learning. 7th Conference Edition Florence, Italy 13-14 November 2014. - libreriauniversita-ria.it edizioni – P.26-29; Belenkova N. Kruse I., Making Verbal Presentation: Challenges and Solutions. Proceedings of ICERI2016 Conference, 14th-16th November 2016, Seville, Spain, – pp 6221-6223) The goal of this paper is to study the theoretical and practical issues of training listening skills for academic purposes on the example of teaching foreign languages for specific purposes at RUDN University (Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia).

Keywords:

Teaching foreign languages for specific purposes in a non-linguistic university, training listening skills for academic purposes, the experience of teaching practice.