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Pedagogy
UDC 372.881.111.1
candidate of philological sciences, associate professor Butova Anna Vladimirovna
Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University (Magnitogorsk)
THE ROLE OF PROFESSIONALLY-ORIENTED TEXTS IN COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE BUILDING AMONG NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
Аннотация. Одной из основных особенностей современной системы высшего образования является ориентированность на приобретение и умение применить практические навыки, необходимые для решения конкретно обозначенных практических задач. В связи с этим требования к уровню языковой подготовки в техническом вузе претерпели значительные изменения. Цель статьи - рассмотреть профессионально-ориентированное чтение как один из компонентов коммуникативной деятельности будущих специалистов. Подчеркивается, что владение чтением на иностранном языке представляет собой средство формирования профессиональной коммуникативной компетенции, а также условие для успешной профессиональной деятельности и общения. Описываются этапы обучения чтению, виды профессионально-ориентированного чтения, а также роль и задачи преподавателя в отборе текстов и мотивации студентов. Также в статье предлагаются примеры упражнений для каждого из этапов работы с иноязычным текстом.
Ключевые слова: неязыковой вуз, языковая подготовка, профессионально-ориентированное чтение, навыки чтения, знания по специальности, речевая деятельность.
Annotation. One of the main features of the modern higher education system is the focus on acquisition and the ability to apply the practical skills necessary to solve specific practical problems. In this regard, the requirements for the level of language training in a technical university have undergone significant changes. The purpose of the article is to consider professionally-oriented reading as one of the components in future specialists' speech activity. It is emphasized that FL (foreign language) reading skills is a means of professional communicative competence building, as well as a condition for successful professional activity and communication. The stages of teaching reading, types of professionally-oriented reading, as well as the teacher's role and function in the text selection and students' motivation are described. The article also offers examples of exercises for each stages of working with a FL text.
Keywords: a non-linguistic university, the foreign language competence, professionally-oriented reading, reading skills, specialty knowledge, a speech activity.
Introduction. The accession of our country into the European and International Community causes a change in attitudes towards foreign language study within modern Russian society. In recent years, the need for specialists who speak foreign languages has greatly increased, which is extremely important for strengthening their competitiveness in Russia's entry to the world market in the age of economic globalization.
In this regard, the requirements for the foreign language competence at a technical university have changed. The practical purposes for foreign language teaching are engineering graduates' level attainment in foreign language professionally-oriented communicative competence, which allows them to use a foreign language as a means of intercultural communication at the international standards in their professional activities [4].
Professionally-oriented reading is considered in this study as a component of specialists' communicative activity and is a special form of people interaction in the process of professional activity.
The professionally-oriented reading is carried out within the professionally- oriented training, which assumes a highly specialized training orientation, the obligatory identification of students' communicative needs, defining clear learning goals and content, the allocation of specific professional and communicative skills as objects of focused work, the adoption of a technical text as a training unit [1].
It is not coincidental, therefore, that reading skills remain the most important component in communicative competence, formed among students during their studies at a university. Reading foreign language special literature is one of the obligatory forms of the learning process in a non-linguistic university, which is explained by the constantly increasing information flow coming through the media and the Internet [3].
The main body of the article. FLSP teaching is currently recognized as a priority area in education updating [5].
It became necessary to take a new look at the learning process in general and at foreign language learning in particular. Foreign language communication is becoming an essential component of specialists' professional activity. Analysis of pedagogical scientific and methodological sources has shown that there are countless methodological directions and techniques for foreign language teaching at non-linguistic university faculties. Currently, the task is not only to master the FL communication skills, but also to acquire specialty knowledge.
Considering a foreign language as a means of forming a future specialist's professional orientation, N.D. Galskova notes that when studying professionally- oriented language material, a two-way connection is established between a student's desire to acquire special knowledge and the success of language acquisition [2, p. 4].
She considers a foreign language to be an effective means of professional and social orientation in a non-linguistic university. According to the author, to realize this potential, the following conditions must be met:
- a clear purpose statement in FL speech activity;
- social and professional orientation of this activity;
- learners' satisfaction in solving particular problems;
- the formation of learners' ability to take a creative approach to a particular problem solution;
- a favorable psychological climate in a learning team.
In linguodidactics and teaching methods of modern foreign languages and cultures, the issue of teaching professionally-oriented reading has been studied for several decades. Foreign language professionally-oriented reading as part of a future specialist's training is considered not only as one of the types of speech activity, but also as a basis for teaching listening, speaking and writing. Thus, reading acts as a means of forming professional
communicative competence and is considered as a necessary condition for a specialist's successful professional activity in the future.
Reading can be a fairly highly motivated in the learning process because of the availability of information sources; it can contribute to further FL mastery, ensuring the education continuity independently. It should also be noted that working with professionally-oriented texts contributes to the improvement of students' skills to work with a dictionary, special literature and terminology, as well as the formation of professional information, communication skills, and general cultural and professional knowledge. Not the least role is played by the fact that many teachers, even in conditions of study time shortage, are aware of the reality in achieving learning purposes in this type of speech activity.
The issue of teaching reading according to a level system of certain standards cannot be resolved in isolation from the higher education system as a whole. Within the multilevel system of professional education being developed today, three levels are distinguished: incomplete higher education - bachelor's degree - specialist / master's degree. In full accordance with it, the program on "Foreign Language" discipline identifies three consecutive training stages and defines the purpose of each of them - students' achievement of a specific reading proficiency level, corresponding to a particular training stage [7].
As a result of the first training stage, which is considered as basic, a level of language and speech competence should be formed, sufficient for further learning activities.
At the second training stage, the level of communicative competence, necessary for FL activities to study foreign experience, as well as for business professional communication is built. At the same time, the student should use the original literature, applying various reading techniques with greater speed.
The purpose of the third stage of FL teaching is to achieve such a level in FL proficiency that will allow carrying out qualified information activities in various situations of business partnership.
At the same time, students use four types of reading at the level of advanced proficiency. In most educational programs, when describing each training stage, not only purposes are named, but reading parameters as a type of speech activity are set and the nature of reading materials is determined [6]. Due to this, it is possible to represent the learning levels of reading, corresponding to the listed training stages as some standards that can be used as a guideline when organizing each training stage.
It is also obvious that one cannot but take into account Russia's joining the European educational environment. Council of Europe experts have developed a level system of FL proficiency, based on a communicative approach and including all types of speech activity. At the same time, the level of language proficiency is understood as the degree of certain competencies building.
This degree of communicative competencies formation is assessed in terms of the effectiveness in the process of verbal communication and the realization in the ability to communicate in various situations. Reading is an integral part of communicative competencies.
Speaking about the teaching professionally-oriented reading in a non-linguistic university, the teacher should understand that reading texts in the specialty can be complicated by ignorance or misunderstanding of the linguistic phenomena inherent in a foreign language. Therefore, the teacher's task is to remove all language difficulties as much as possible, to neutralize grammatical, lexical and phonetic difficulties. Teachers, choosing one or another language material for studying it in the classroom for professionally-oriented reading, should proceed from students' knowledge, skills and abilities building - how well students are prepared for work and extracting the necessary information from texts. Besides the need to constant students' stimulating to read texts and to learn the language in general, the development of a future specialist's professional competence is also important.
Non-linguistic students will be involved in the discussion process in general, and in the professionally-oriented reading process in particular, only if it meets and satisfies their professional needs. Therefore, if the text is relevant, meaningful and informative; and if it includes FL highly specialized terminology, grammatical and lexical structures in accordance with the level of students' knowledge, then they will be willingly involved in teaching professionally-oriented reading process. One of the important conditions is that the texts should be selected in accordance with students' specialization.
Reading, like any speech activity, is purposeful. Its purpose is to extract information assuming an adequate understanding of the text content. The main characteristics of understanding are completeness, accuracy and depth. Depending on the purpose of reading, different methodologists distinguish up to 50 types of it. However, the practice of teaching reading and the analysis of non-linguistic university graduates' professional activity indicate that four types of reading are relevant for them: introductory, studying, search and viewing. Mature reading ability presupposes both mastery of all reading types, and ease of transition from one type to another, depending on the change in the purpose of obtaining information.
The purpose of the introductory reading is to understand the general text content - usually 70-75% of the facts contained in the text. The available linguistic material used for it creates favorable conditions for correct methods building in perceptual processing of the material, i.e. reading techniques. The introductory reading creates favorable conditions for the transfer of reading techniques from the native language, so it should prevail during the first training stage. The introductory reading is cognitive reading, in which the entire speech work (book, article, story) becomes a reader's subject of attention without the intention to receive certain information. This is a reading "for oneself', without prior special setting for the subsequent use or reproduction of the information received.
During the introductory reading the main communicative task facing a reader is to extract the basic information contained in it as a result of a quick reading of the entire text, i.e. find out what issues and how are resolved in the text, what exactly is said in it on these issues. It requires the ability to distinguish between primary and secondary information.
To achieve the introductory reading purposes, according to S.K. Folomkina, it is enough to understand 75% of the text's predication, if the remaining 25% do not include the key text provisions that are essential for understanding its content [8, p. 95].
The pace of the introductory reading should not be lower than 180 for English and French, 150 for German, and 120 words per minute for Russian.
For practice in this type of reading, long texts are used, linguistically light, containing at least 30% of redundant, secondary information.
The studying reading aims to develop an accurate understanding of the entire text. In addition, its task is to form students' ability to overcome difficulties in understanding a foreign text independently. The studying reading provides
for the most complete and accurate understanding of all information contained in the text and its critical understanding. Its task is also to build a student's ability to overcome difficulties in understanding a foreign text independently. The study object in this type of reading is the information contained in the text, but not linguistic material. The studying reading is distinguished by the deliberate highlighting of the most important theses to memorize the content for subsequent retelling, discussion, and use in work.
For this type of reading, texts are selected that have cognitive value, informative significance and are the most difficult for this learning stage, both in terms of content and language.
As a result of the viewing reading, the most general idea of the information source can be obtained; it is possible to determine the topic of the text, sometimes the range of issues considered in the text. This type of reading requires from the reader not only a fairly high qualification as a reader, but also mastery of a significant amount of language material, and therefore often refers to more advanced stages of learning.
The search reading is used to find the information you need - some definition, wording, etc. In a specialist's professional activity this is an independent type of reading, in learning conditions it acts more like an exercise and is usually an accompanying component in the development of other reading types.
The information obtained when working on foreign language sources comes to students at the very time when they begin to study the relevant topics in the courses of the major disciplines (the second course at the university). The purpose of the texts selected for classes is to prepare students for independent reading of specialty literature with minimal dictionary use. The general characteristic of the professional texts complexity can be attributed to the wide coverage of linguistic material, complex content, and complexity of grammatical structures. One of the main tasks facing the teacher in building FL competence is to teach adequate translation when working with professionally-oriented texts, i.e. such a translation, in which the author's thoughts are conveyed accurately, the appropriate terminology is used, and the stylistic norms of the native language are observed. Tasks for texts should be created taking into account the development of self-learning methods among students, which will allow them to master the techniques of extracting information from texts and methods of transferring it in the form of annotation, translation, in the form of oral reports and messages on the topics of their specialty.
In the practice of developing reading skills, the following two options are used:
a) introductory - learning - viewing - search;
b) studying - introductory - viewing - searching.
The second variant seems to us the most effective, since it prepares to a greater extent all other types of reading. Reading can and should be used as a means of teaching oral forms of communication. Using reading as a means of teaching oral communication is necessary for mastering normative pronunciation skills, automating reading skills to oneself, developing lexical and grammatical skills. These purposes are designed to form students' language competence, without which oral communication is impossible. Based on the printed text, numerous language exercises are performed, designed to introduce lexical and grammatical structures. Among them:
a) imitative exercises, the purpose of which is to reproduce a language sample at the level of its repetition;
b) intensive repetition of a speech pattern, the purpose of which is to teach how to formulate various types of questions;
c) image modification and transformation, the purpose of which is to transfer the using skill of the grammatical form to a new text;
d) correction of pronunciation skills and their automation.
One of the purposes to work with a text in a non-linguistic university is further development of reading skills with an understanding of the full content. What techniques can be used to achieve this purpose?
At the pre-text stage, to remove difficulties in understanding the text content, the teacher provides information about the author and summarizes the text content as a whole. To relieve language difficulties, students are invited to complete a series of exercises in which language guessing and word formation skills are developed:
1) please tell me from which words these words are derived;
2) determine the meaning of complex nouns by components;
3) find the same root words;
4) name the dictionary form of the following words;
5) determine from which verbs the following nouns are derived;
6) determine the type of the relative clause, translate;
7) write the following numerals in numbers;
8) find the equivalents of the following words (from Russian to foreign);
9) determine the word meaning from context.
At the text stage, the student performs exercises aimed at extracting the main and secondary information by finding the meaning of the text, the lexical and thematic basis, combining the semantic segments into a single whole:
1) read the first paragraph of the text; what it is about;
2) read the text; what it is about;
3) find in the third paragraph the words that describe ...;
4) define a key sentence in each paragraph.
At the post-text stage, the understanding of the text content is monitored and its interpretation is given. For this, students are invited to complete the following tasks:
1) arrange words in a logical sequence according to the text content;
2) confirm the statements with the sentences from the text;
3) complete the sentences;
4) answer the questions;
5) tell what new you have learned from the text.
The degree of understanding completeness reflects a quantitative measure of information extracted from the text, taking all the text facts as 100%. When assessing the level of reading proficiency, a combination of indirect indicators can be used: on the one hand, the completeness and accuracy of understanding the text, on the other, the reading speed.
Conclusion. To summarize, it may be said that at present, FL reading competence presupposes that the reader must comply with a certain reading level of - a standard. These standards are fixed in the discipline program "Foreign Language" as the final purposes of the three stages of FL teaching.
It should be noted, however, that the process of FL learning is always individual in nature, therefore attempts to establish some "levels" of language proficiency, manifested, in particular, in such communicative competence as reading, are to a certain extent relative. The possibility of a more accurate determination of the level of students' reading training assumes further improvement in control forms and types.
References:
1. Буран А.Л. Обучение студентов неязыкового вуза профессионально-ориентированному чтению с использованием средств информационных и коммуникационных технологий: автореф. дисс. ... к. п. н. Томск, 2006. 20 с.
2. Гальскова Н.Д. Современная методика обучения иностранному языку: Пособие для учителя. М: АРКТИ-Глосса, 2000. 165 с.
3. Дубских А.И. Интерактивные технологии в процессе обучения иностранному языку // Вопросы лингводидактики и межкультурной коммуникации в контексте современных исследований: сборник научных статей XI Международной научно-практической конференции. Чебоксары, 2019. С. 167-171.
4. Кисель О.В. Инновационные стратегии обучения как средство повышения мотивированности студентов // Актуальные проблемы современного общего и профессионального образования: сборник статей по материалам IV Всероссийской заочной научно-практической конференции. Магнитогорск: Изд-во Магнитогорск. гос. техн. ун-та им. Г.И. Носова, 2019. С. 50-54.
5. Кисель О.В. Обучение чтению на основе профессионально-ориентированных текстов // Актуальные проблемы современной науки, техники и образования:тезисы докладов 77-й международной научно-технической конференции. Магнитогорск: Изд-во Магнитогорск. гос. техн. ун-та им. Г.И. Носова, 2019. С. 380-381.
6. Лингвометодические аспекты профессионально ориентированного обучения иностранным языкам: традиции и инновации: монография / коллектив авторов под ред. В.П. Барбашова, И.И. Климовой, М.В. Мельничук, Л.С. Чикилёва. М.: Финансовый университет, 2014. 240 с.
7. Программа дисциплины «Иностранный язык», рекомендованная Научно-методическим советом по иностранным языкам МОН РФ, 2010.
8. Фоломкина С.К. Обучение чтению на иностранном языке в неязыковом вузе: учебно-методическое пособие. М., 2005. 253 с.
Pedagogy
UDC 378.2
senior teacher Bykova Liliya Marsovna
Minin Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University (Minin University) (Nizhny Novgorod)
AFFORDANCES OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES FOR TEACHING SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE
WRITING
Аннотация. В статье рассматриваются технологии веб 2.0, в частности блоги, вики, Google Docs и Facebook, которые наиболее часто используются в обучении и развитии навыков иноязычной письменной речи. Выделены и проанализированы функции данных веб-технологий и рассмотрены возможности их эффективного применения для формирования и совершенствования навыков письменной речи на иностранном языке у студентов высших учебных заведений.
Ключевые слова: возможности технологий веб 2.0, навыки письменной речи, коммуникативные функции, коллаборативное письмо.
Annotation. The article examines the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies and their potential for teaching second/foreign language writing in a variety of higher educational settings. It identifies features and functions of Web 2.0 technologies and presents the ways in which they are effectively harnessed for developing students' writing skills. This article is restricted to an analysis of the most frequently used Web 2.0 technologies employed for teaching writing: blogs, wikis, Google Docs and Facebook.
Keywords: affordances of Web 2.0 technologies, writing skills, communicative features, collaborative writing.
Introduction. Web 2.0 is a platform that delivers constantly updated services people use 'consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation' to deliver user experiences' [18, p. 17]. Web 2.0 technologies include synchronous and asynchronous tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.), social bookmarking, photo/video sharing platforms, and Google Docs, among other platforms. Due to the multiple affordances of Web 2.0 tools, they are deemed useful for language learning, particularly for developing learners' writing skills [2; 10].
By definition, 'affordance' refers to the properties of an object that allow people to interact with it by performing certain actions [8]. Web 2.0 technologies with their innovative affordances, the most prominent of which are interconnectedness, immediacy and interactivity, offer language learners ample opportunities to communicate in an authentic writing environment generating ideas, creating content and sharing it with a responsive audience. Considering the potential of Web 2.0 technologies for developing students' writing skills, university teachers are incorporating them into their writing instruction. The most frequently used tools are wikis, blogs, Google Docs and Facebook [21].
Statement of basic materials. A wiki, one of the most popular Web 2.0 technologies used in higher education, is a web space where users can create content, add new information, edit and publish it. From the technical perspective, a wiki application is easy to use as it does not require any special web skills. It is not restrictive in terms of time, space and design complexity: users can work on the same text anywhere anytime, embed multimedia files and provide hyperlinks. Due to the editing functions, anyone can modify the content of a wiki page, retain all previous versions of a document and compare the recent and older versions to observe the changes.
However, the fact that the wiki content can be modified by anyone can actually undermine the effectiveness of the application. Some students are negative about their work being changed by others; they tend to take individual
