Abstract:

Paper deals with the challenges that university teachers face in terms of the targeted development of professional competencies of engineering university students. Authors put forwards the hypothesis that this development of competencies would be possible through the realization of the competency potential of each of the academic subjects incorporated into the university curricula. Educational experts recognize this realization of the competency potential to be a vital issue in the context of the current revision of both the content and the technology of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in Russia and internationally. The interdisciplinary approach is rendered here as being escalated to a new level that is characterized with the planning of the content of training in all academic subjects in engineering education on the background of some invariant elements, thus, making the content more interdisciplinary, profession-oriented and ergonomic. Then the authors turn to the findings of the longitudinal research conducted in 1999-2016; the research bases on the consideration of the requirements of the stakeholders in the field of foreign language teaching (FLT) in terms of the specific aspects of the profession-relevant FLT content and technology. The article presents the research findings acquired in the framework of the survey conducted over American, Belarussian, Dutch, German and Russian TVET through the summation of the questionnaire results collected from TVET stakeholders. Results revealed that the realization of the competency potential of academic subjects in engineering education leads to the reduction of the workload of both students and teachers; as well, implementation of this approach within trial teaching has also proved to advance the efficiency of the university teaching/learning process within TVET, this efficiency being in the statistically significant advance in the employability of the graduates surveyed in the second questionnaire-mediated cross-section. As a follow-up of the research, the relevant problems of the realization of the competency potential of an academic subject in engineering education are scrutinized, and practice-proved solutions of are offered. The key results obtained in the research also include the development of the curricula and syllabi for Russian TVET, these materials featuring higher degree of relevance to the requirements of the Russian TVET stakeholders.

Keywords:

FLT, competency potential of a subject, English for Professional Purposes, stakeholders, competency approach, TVET.