DIGITAL LIBRARY
PROBLEMS OF PROFESSIONAL MULTILINGUALISM AT UNIVERSITY AND THEIR SOLUTIONS
Gumilyov Eurasian National University (KAZAKHSTAN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN16 Proceedings
Publication year: 2016
Pages: 1608-1616
ISBN: 978-84-608-8860-4
ISSN: 2340-1117
doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2016.1320
Conference name: 8th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 4-6 July, 2016
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
Multilingualism as the formation object of Kazakhstan universities is an urgent task today, because a foreign language as a component of multilingual personality must be formed for future professional activities.

The legislative basis for the implementation of multilingual education in Kazakhstan is The State Program of Development and Functioning of Languages, which is being realized in three stages. At the second stage (2014-2016) new technologies and methods of multilingualism are studied and implemented.

The obstacles to achieve professionally oriented communicative competence in foreign language turn to be:
1) Kazakhstan, in comparison with the European countries, due to its geographical position, has no conditions for the natural development of mass multilingualism with knowledge of an active world language.
2) The system of teaching means of non-native languages (including foreign ones) does not correspond to the strategic objective of forming a communicative competence.
3) The content of textbooks in foreign language for different specialties is a set of professionally-oriented texts and tasks before or after a text, which do not arise a natural motivation to learn a foreign language.
4) The criteria-based assessment system of language proficiency level, speech and communicative competence which should be developed by researchers of linguistic didactics is not used.

Our scientific research is devoted to the problems of improving the content of the discipline "Foreign language" for not linguistic specialties.
The content analysis of model programs of foreign language for school and university has shown that the language component still represents the minimized abstract language system, which is distributed in a linearly concentric way. In this case, the combination of the speech and language material is artificial.

We propose to improve the content of teaching a professionally oriented language at universities in the following aspects:
- structuring of the content of professional communication by scientific minimizing of themes;
- detection of the list of required speech intentions within the selected communication themes;
- scientific selection of professional vocabulary, which is described on functional-semantic basis and is presented in the form of functional-semantic teaching units;
- use of functional-semantic grammar means that best correspond to the process of formation of speech and communicative competence;
- detection of the place of selected teaching units in the process of formation of professionally oriented communicative competence;
- focus on the final result - formation of professionally-oriented communicative competence - via science-based assessment criteria.

To solve the set problems we accomplished the scientific selection of teaching material for the specialty "Oil and Gas Studies", a thematic series of classes were developed and tested in the educational process of the university.

The results of the control (CG) and experimental(EG) groups:
- The ability to use key words relating to theme in their own statements freely: CG -10%, EG -80%
- The ability to express their thoughts on theme by various types of statements: CG -10%, EG -80%
- The ability to initiate a dialogue: CG -10%, EG -70%
- The ability to speak on the subject holistically: CG -30% (retelling) , EG -70% (production)
- The ability to compose written productive monological statements: CG -30%, EG -90%
Keywords:
Multilingualism, professionally oriented language, future professional activities.