Abstract:

Modern multicultural world requires profound foreign language communication skills as one of the basic factors determining the successful professional activity in any field. Conferences, exchanges, collaborations and publication all involve extensive ancillary correspondence. Much research has been devoted to the problems of teaching Academic English for publication, less attention has been paid to the need to correspond in English. Based on the research, we designed a new professional development course, “English for Researchers: Academic Correspondence” which was implemented in South Ural State University. The article reveals the main methodological approaches and principles applied during vocational training i.e. a system approach, competence-based and interdisciplinary approaches. The course specifies the forms and methods of interaction between participants and lecturers. Furthermore, we provide interactive technology to successfully realize the implementation of the course. A questionnaire, which was designed to gain the academics’ opinion of the course after studying, shows that the participants were satisfied with their own results. They consider this course important to their academic careers. However, from the staff perspective it appears that academics lack specific grammar and need more practice. After validation of the course and making some corrections, the course ensures that Russian academics can participate in conferences, exchanges, collaborations successfully, and play a fuller role in global intellectual events.

Keywords:

Academic correspondence, methodological approaches, vocational training, forms and methods of interaction.