LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN TEACHING A SPECIAL-PURPOSE LANGUAGE

Teaching English to University students, whose majors are either sciences or humanities, aims at developing their cross-cultural communicative competence based on professional knowledge and skills which will allow them to use English as a means of general- and special-purpose communication in the work and research areas.

One of the ways to greatly contribute to students’ professional image in the future is shaping their professional language image which is supported by enlarging professional vocabulary. Thus, we, as teachers, may use two approaches to teaching students special-purpose languages. The first approach is focused on introducing new terms and special words naming professional ideas, things, objects and processes, and, therefore, working on students’ memorizing the new professional vocabulary. The second one consists in research-based activities aiming at students’ studying and understanding language laws and processes such as mechanisms of metaphor, metonymy, and theory of primary and secondary nomination that regularly take place in a language and underlie the development of a special-purpose language.

In our talk, firstly, we will characterize a special-purpose language as a dynamic system designed to name things and processes. We will dwell on the ways of developing special-purpose vocabularies and their role in communicating professional ideas. Secondly, we will look at metaphor as an effective and regular tool to develop special secondary meanings of common words in technical languages. In this part we will also focus on a special-purpose language, language tools and techniques, used by PR and advertising specialists who shape public opinion. Thirdly, we will illustrate the effectiveness of this research-based approach to enlarging students’ professional vocabulary. Fourthly, we will demonstrate research-based tasks and activities designed to develop students’ professional vocabulary using professional-oriented academic and newspaper texts and stories in our booklet.