Abstract:

Teaching a foreign language at a technical university chiefly gets its bearing from the necessities of the core technical disciplines within the curriculum, and through them from the industry demanding the level of language skills to be high enough for future engineers to be perfectly able to perform and deliver in any professional context. It means that the language course for engineers has a strong practical slant being mainly focused on building up professionally-oriented foreign-language communicative competence.

However, with the syntactic and grammatical intricacy as well as semantic complexities of the academic discourse, the purely practical approach does not appear to be efficient enough for forming the competence components that deal with receptive cognitive processing of lengthy authentic academic texts characterized inter alia by high terminological density. This leads to a divergence between the need for an engineering student to copiously read different kinds of research literature in a foreign language for a variety of professional disciplines and the insufficiency of general language skills for that purpose.

Therefore, this paper looks into the ways to enhance methods for teaching engineering students reading skills, with regards to both perception and production, as applied to cognitive processing of authentic scientific discourse texts related to a specific area of expertise. It is assumed that this goal can only be achieved through a combination of linguistic and pedagogical approaches, the former laying the analytical groundwork for the latter.

The paper presents the results of a study of difficulties which engineering students encounter when reading authentic research literature in English and singles out one of the essential factors hindering the learning process – identification, understanding, translation, and use of Polynomial Attributive Word Combinations (PAWC) that are of high occurrence in such texts according to the statistical analysis undertaken by the authors. It defines the phenomenon, describes the structure, morphology and the nature, type and direction of relations between the components. All the findings are summarized in tables and presented schematically for better visualization.

The paper further proceeds to analyze the resulting patterns from the pedagogical perspective. It lays out the primary factors that account for PAWCs being difficult for perception and interpretation, among which is the possibly large number of components, variability in grammatical structure, semantic cohesion and syntactic relations within PAWCs, along with the fact that only 13% of such word combinations are given in dictionaries as fixed collocations. Then the authors select patterns presenting most difficulty for the students. They use the inductive learning technique to develop an algorithm for teaching students how to identify, understand and translate PAWCs as well as use them further in writings of their own.

The conclusion is made that an integrative approach where the findings of a linguistic analysis of the material used for teaching reading skills are interpreted from the pedagogical perspective and then translated into teaching techniques, is the one yielding an optimum effect.

Keywords:

Foreign language education, polynomial attributive word combinations, technical university, reading skills, reading research literature, inductive teaching.