Abstract:

Technological progress acceleration, digitalization and globalization in modern society not only affect the change of personality, its interests and values, but also lead to various innovative processes in the field of education, putting forward new goals and searching for ways to achieve them. Despite the fact that the most popular professions are still the professions of an engineer and an information technology specialist, modern socio-economic and cultural and national conditions impose new requirements on these specialists, foreign language competences being of great importance. It is business communication skills that is the main component of the professional competence of a modern business person.

The article considers one of business communication genres - business letter writing - and describes the experience of teaching business correspondence to students of the Russian University of Transport (MIIT). The fact is that the discipline "A foreign language in business communication" is included as mandatory in a number of bachelor's, specialist's and master's technical major, for example, "Innovation", "Personnel Management in Transport", etc. The curriculum assumes, in addition to the thematic principle of studying the discipline, the development of business correspondence skills. Besides, the skills of business letter writing and translation form an obligatory component of the program "Translator in the field of professional communication", implemented in RUT (MIIT).

Starting with working definitions of culture, communication, intercultural communication and its basic features, we dwell on the genre of business letter writing, consider the requirements to business letters as well as their main types.

The proposed methodology of developing business communication skills comprises several basic elements. Firstly, we analyze the difficulties encountered by students at the start of the course. Secondly, we describe the principles of work organization. Finally, special attention is given to the realization of three stages of business correspondence skills development.

In conclusion we outline possible difficulties and give recommendations on obtaining positive results, bearing in mind that it is the implementation of all the above-mentioned elements of business correspondence skills development in the process of education that can give positive results.

Keywords:

Business communication, genre, business correspondence, skills development, professional competence.