Abstract:

This paper is devoted to the issue of methodological algorithms that could be applied to training students of economic universities in order to impart the skills of business interviewing. The paper pursues the following objectives:
1) to consider the goals, tasks and functions of business interviews;
2) to explore the aspects underlying the differences existing between a business interview and other types of oral communication in the framework of business communication studies;
3) to justify the importance of the methodological issue in the framework of today’s ESP training;
4) to describe business interviews as essential components of business communication, enabling the parties to accomplish specific communicative objectives by making use of verbal means and modifying the speaker’s role in certain contexts.
The authors dwell on the following key methodological issues:
1) professional communicative competence required to efficiently impart business interviewing skills: having students explore and comprehensively analyze the basic properties of business interviews, training them to seek ways to harmonize business communication which is an increasingly important task in ESP training; high priority should be given to the ways of improving the communicative efficiency of business interviews;
2) the need to review question-answer communicative blocks (QACB) as a structured system of interrelated judgements, bearing high theoretical and practical potential and requiring special consideration in the course of training economics students;
3) introduction of the so-called “stimulating remarks” as one of the key features of business interviews, giving the interviewer an opportunity to obtain more detailed information, formulate the topic for discussion and encourage respondent’s involvement.
In conclusion, the authors underline the necessity to intensify the significance of training algorithms to be applied when teaching proper handling of interrogative constructions – a critical component of business interviews. As a rule, a question can stimulate a specific feedback that directly depends on the form and content of the question. The authors suggest and demonstrate that in the framework of QACB, the feedback presents an autonomous linguistic component characterized by particular syntactical and semantic structure, as well as specific emotional features.

Keywords:

Professional language, business interview skills, professional communicative competence, business communication, stimulating remarks.