Abstract:

The present day politicized lifestyle demonstrates the undisguised interest in the language of politics, which is aimed at manipulation of mass consciousness. This peculiar feature of the language of political science is in the scope of interests for linguists as well as ESP teachers. Teaching a language to the students of political science requires the development of a special approach to its implementation. F. de Saussure suggesting the dichotomy “lingua - parole” laid the foundation for the initial comprehension of the essence of language interaction as well as the development of new methods of teaching a language for professionally oriented purposes. In the light of the aforementioned dichotomy and the modern discourse theory relevant becomes the study of an utterance in a situational context which allows to distinguish, on the one hand, the language competence as knowledge of the complex language system and, on the other hand, the speech competence as a skill to implement the knowledge into practice.
The interrelation of language and politics takes place within the frames of socially conditioned communication, which allows to single out some aspects of this interaction: the language serving politics is its prime instrument since political interaction is largely based on the language system; not only does politics exercise an influence with the help of language, but it changes the language itself.
The pragmatic aspect is of primary importance here. In teaching the language of politics we should take into account the fact that in politics action is reflected in the language, hence any utterance of politicians is regarded as an action in real life. In teaching English to the students of political science one should work out and implement a model of the process of competence development for the future experts in the field, theoretically explain the necessity of the applied methods and carry out an experiment revealing the required academic terms which contribute to the development of professional competences of the students of political science learning foreign languages.
It should be noted that professionally oriented lexical and grammatical exercises alone are not enough to study all the aspects of the language. The teacher is to create special conditions to let students feel the real profession and imagine themselves as real politicians. For this purpose it is necessary to conduct seminars in the English language for the students to discuss complicated political issues which will later result in the faculty and then interfaculty conferences as well as large scale strategic role-playing games of the UN Model type.
This work requires special efforts on the side of the instructor who is to develop a pilot testing programme aimed at the necessary competence development of the students of political science, to identify the necessary academic conditions for the purpose, to check the intermediate results as well as to analyze the outcome of the invented programme in terms of its effectiveness for the development of professional competences in the process of teaching English to the students of political science.
The command of the foreign language for special purposes in modern society presupposes not only the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar but also the skills to apply it in practice, which demands special training and preparation.

Keywords:

Language of politics, students of political science, to develop competences, conduct seminars, hold conferences, large scale strategic role-playing games.