Педагогические науки

2. Проблемы подготовки специалистов

Абрамович Г. В., Тульчак Л. В.

Вінницький національний технічний університет

Teaching foreign languages to the students of the higher technical educational establishments

Concerning teaching foreign languages to the students of the higher technical educational establishments there still exist some problems:

· a small amount of academic time for academic practice (up to 164 hours for the whole course „Foreign language“ comprising 4 years of study);

· insufficient amount of textbooks, containing the texts of professional orientation, which remain actual enough to keep the interest of the student up, thus ensuring the motivational constituent of the modern pedagogical science;

· differing levels of knowledge of the language, which supposes the presence of the differentiated approach to studying.

That is why professional pedagogics has addressed the abovementioned problems quite often recently. Some ways of solving them have already been proposed by a number of scientists.

One of them – application of special professionally-oriented computer technologies for teaching foreign languages in the higher technical educational establishments seems to be quite efficient when being accompanied by the combination of dedicated software and methodological materials.

This paper addresses some aspects of using such technologies as a possible means of teaching English at the Vinnytsya national technical university to the students of computer engineering specialities.

As a fact, 164 academic hours are assigned for studying foreign language – moreover, this amount is intended for 4 years of study. It’s absolutely obvious, that this term is out of all proportion to the purpose of educational goal of the course “professionally oriented foreign language” – „forming of the professionally directed communicative linguistic competence which is being developed on the basis of interrelated, speech, linguistic social – cultural development of students in accordance with their age-specific features and professional interests on every stage of studying foreign language”.

Yet, some more 160 hours are provided by the program for independent studies. They cannot be controlled by the teacher – a student is supposed to work the material out independently. Of course, not all the students make use of this time effectively and on purpose. In addition, as we have mentioned above, an average level of knowledge of foreign languages among the freshmen is extremely low, and this fact keeps a teacher from quick reviewing the school base course and changing over to the study of the specialized vocabulary and forming of professional foreign language competence as early as in the first year of studies in the university. That is why, a teacher usually has to start with in-depth studying of the simplest grammatical constructions and reading of the easiest adapted texts, which have little in common with the specialized editions and technical documents the students will have to do with in their future professional practice.

Moreover, the situation gets more complicated in the case when the students comprising the group demonstrate very differing knowledge. As a result, a teacher is forced to be oriented for the medium level of the group, which, naturally, doesn’t fit with the needs of neither those whose knowledge is rated high nor those knowledge of which is very poor.

As a result, some sufficient number of students become absolutely indifferent to mastering the language, though their professional progress may (and very likely) later depend on the knowledge of this very language. Out-of-date textbooks don’t give rise to further self-educating as well. Thus, some perspective students fall behind.

Having taken into consideration the abovementioned we can assume that the process of forming of professionally oriented foreign language competence can be organized more effectively if some modern computer technology is applied in addition to the traditional tuition – to our opinion the idea of the total reorganization of the educational process in this sphere and introducing a kind of off-line studies of such a discipline as foreign language proves to be neither technically possible nor very effective (which is the most important).

One of the most promising ways of combining traditional educational process with computerized learning can become a multimedia program designed for implementing some testing work. A teacher will be able to make use of the academic hours for introducing some speaking, listening and other tasks which are difficult to realize by correspondence. This addresses the senior students most of all as they are obliged to home-read a lot of professionally oriented literature and then be tested for having done it in class. And, as the main goal is, nevertheless, teaching reading professionally oriented texts a teacher is free to introduce all the necessary texts on the local or global network for independent work and following on- or off-line testing. The texts can easily be sorted by:

o specialization

o size

o level of difficulty and other

Subsequently both: the teacher and the student benefit from this method which seems to be very effective for it helps to organize the efficient independent reading and stimulate interest for working with original and up-to-date information (as it is very easy to update any information sited in the network).

On the other side it can also help to establish some cooperation process between the teacher and the student – students have always been the most progressive strata of society and they surely know what should be done to find the interesting information on the Internet or compile some testing materials with the help of the most efficient but new and unknown to the teacher software.

We aren’t speaking now about practicing some teleconferences or making educational video which are also very effective, but seem to be quite expensive – we’re just considering a very simple and effective way of teaching foreign languages to the students of the higher technical educational establishments that is sure to be introduced soon as one of the most indispensable methodologies of professional pedagogics.