Abstract:

Technical education is one of Russia’s priority development strategies allowing the country to increase the competitive capacity of its economy in the modern world. Russian national research technical universities are viewed as a powerful force to train highly professional specialists capable of doing innovative research projects and building global partnerships.

The strategic goal of National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) is to become one of the world-renowned research universities. In accordance with its strategic goal, TPU aims to reinforce its academic training and increase its specialists’ competitiveness.

One of the competences that a modern specialist should possess is related to foreign language proficiency. Foreign language proficiency is the key to successful international collaboration. Obviously, the priority to build this collaboration is given to English as the language of international significance. However, professional communication in German is also essential since Germany is one of the longstanding partners of the Russian Federation in education, research and innovation. Researchers from Russia are often involved in joint projects with their German partners; take active part in the scientific and educational events supported by the foundations from German-speaking countries.

The present paper discusses the outline of the course “Grants and participation in conferences in German-speaking countries”. The course is aimed at developing a professional communicative competence of the TPU research and teaching staff in the German language at the level A2/B1 of European communicative competences for participation in scientific events and writing grant proposals.

The course development was preceded by a 10 year experience of teaching German within a modular advanced training programme “The German language” for TPU research and teaching staff and by many years of teaching experience within the advanced training programme «Developing the professional didactic competence by means of the foreign language (German)».

The course is designed in accordance with the didactic principle of integrity that implies simultaneous acquiring of all four kinds of speech activity skills (speaking, writing, listening, and reading) with the focus on one of these skills alternately at different stages of teaching.

Keywords:

Professional communicative competence, German language, advanced training programme, Grants and participation in conferences in German-speaking countries.