APPROACHES TO DESIGNING A LANGUAGE COURSE FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

The necessity to possess the collaborative engagement skills in the context of global communication becomes the priority task of engineering education, when international communication involves not only linguists, but also engineers and researchers, who do not have any language proficiency. This paper presents the results of the theoretical analysis of the current situation on the language education in Russia. Things there are not so good. We have to admit that weak or not enough developed English communicative skills are the main barrier on the way to fluent and comprehensible communication of Russia representatives at the international labour market.

The solution of the problem should be found in the domain of identification what particular problems we have and for what reasons. Only when the core of a problem has been identified, we can speak about possible perfective interventions that can facilitate the improvement of the entire system of language training. In order to identify the relevant language skills for engineering branches needed to accomplish their job tasks, the authors addressed such a method as a public survey.

The survey was based on 297 respondents participation and aimed to:
• obtain justified data on various foreign language skills required for IT sector for the purpose of their subsequent analysis;
• allow to evaluate whether desired skills are correctly interpreted into learning outcomes of relevant educational syllabus.

The obtained results were considered as a ground for methodological justification of the foreign language skills which were included as key learning outcomes into language educational programmes and on the development of which teaching should be oriented. Then, based on received, the model of teaching foreign language was developed representing a logical system of interconnected units that students need for social adaptation in the foreign speaking surroundings, business communication, professional adaptation, and etc. The model proposed is supposed to bring the language learning\teaching closer to real-to-life language practice and to the needs of the professional fields.