Abstract:

Today society feels urgent need for the experts knowing one or several foreign languages both within daily communication and in the professional sphere in view of rapid process of globalization and informatization of society. Actively developing in the European countries the integrated learning of foreign languages and professional disciplines only begins the way of developing in Russian higher education institutions. This approach is considered as a necessary condition for training of future professionals capable to become members of the international scientific and business community today.

Coordination of teachers of a foreign language with teachers of professional disciplines - experts in technical areas - is necessary for introduction of this approach into the education process. The new type of integration of teachers from different scientific spheres as at the level of joint development of working programs (cooperation, collaboration), and at the level of binary training (team-working) – all this is considered as the real challenge for pedagogical community in Russia now and sets serious problems for scientists-methodologists, teachers of a foreign language and teachers of professional subjects.

In order to start solving this problem we organised a study the main objectives of which were the following:
1) to consider similarities and differences between such different approaches to teaching foreign languages in higher education as English for specific purposes (ESP), which is still very popular in Russia, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL) which has become the most popular in European countries;
2) to consider theoretical and practical features of the approaches which are being developed by Russian scientists on the bases of ideas of intergated teaching;
3) to create and characterize new models of interdicsipinary coordination.

The article presents the observation of modern directions in research devoted to the problem of subject and language integrated learning in the higher education system, tries to answer the question why the ideas of CLIL do not find wide application in the system of Russian higher education. The authors analyze the problem of interdisciplinary ties in the system of higher education in Russia, structure all the appearing approaches into 4 different models, specifying their methodological characteristics, describing these models as innovative methods for multidisciplinary coordination joining together the interests of three participants: teachers of foreign languages, teachers of professional subjects and students.

The main results include the development of theoretical basis for innovative methodology based on the authors personal approach, created by the academic teaching staff of four different technical universities in Russia following the ideas of content and language integrated learning. The results proved the effectiveness of interdisciplinary coordination in the process of solving the tasks of content and language integrated teching and learning.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary coordination, interdisciplinary integration, content and language integrated learning, pedagogical tandems, bilingual training.