In the system of professional training future specialists the forming of the student’s language and communicative personality is considered one of the priority trends of higher school activity.
The fundamental purpose of higher vocational education in present day conditions is focused on training the appropriate level and profile qualified expert, competitive, competent, able to work effectively at the level of international standards, ready to the continuous professional growth, social and professional mobility. Present day expert’s competitiveness is defined not only by his high qualification in the professional sphere but also by the readiness to solve independently professional problems in the conditions of business communication, systemacity of thinking, ability to be reconstructed in the present day promptly changing society.
The present day social and economic conditions require from educational institutions the development of the accurate mechanism of social order accounting which level of implementation defines the experts training quality. In the tendency of the society civilized development and strategic demand of the society, a graduate is to be not only a highly skilled professional in a certain area but also a widely erudite personality having thorough humanitarian training, capable to express adequately himself – socially, intellectually and emotionally – by means of the language, i.e. to be competent communicatively and professionally.
Competent language skills, the existence of skills of cross-cultural communication in concrete professional, business, scientific spheres and situations are considered the integral component of students’ vocational training in any specialty. Therefore the development of the language and communicative competence gained a prior relevance nowadays.
The formation and improvement of the language competence is the most important aspect of teaching languages, as the language competence is the knowledge of the language phenomena and the ability to use them in the productive speech.
“Communication between experts on professional subjects irrespective of its proceeding in the written or oral form, in the official or informal situation, i.e. communication as a special, auxiliary kind of activity providing implementation of the primary professional activity is the professional speech” [1].
In training the specialty language much attention is paid to the formation of oral professional and scientific communication. This term in modern linguistics and methodology is understood as a special functional kind of language: the speech on subjects of science and specialty which is carried out in situations of public and informal communication of specialists-professionals in this or that branch of science and production [2].
The problem of training a competent expert is multidimensional. In order that language and communicative training had a profession-focused character and corresponded to informative needs of the technical profile experts, from the wide complex of universal and professional competences we will allocate the basic one, i.e. readiness:
- to business communication in the professional sphere (ability to organize and to conduct competently business negotiations and conversations),
- to language skills use for the solution of professional tasks;
- to search, systematization, assessment and interpretation of professionally significant information;
- to business correspondence, registration of the report theses, making abstracts and summarizing articles;
- to oral contacts in various conditions and situations of production and other work.
Besides, a present day expert is to know personal features and typical problems of people with whom it is necessary to communicate, to be able to analyze external signals (gestures, facial expressions, intonations), to possess the ability of resolving conflicts, to own skills of active hearing, to possess oratory, to be able to like interests of other person.
The increase of the level of technical specialties students’ language competence is promoted, in our opinion, by the correct introduction in classes of the forms of business communication as it is n impossible to manage without it in the sphere of economic, legal, diplomatic, commercial, administrative relations. The ability to conduct successfully business negotiations, to make competently and correctly the official paper and many other things, became an integral part of the person’s professional culture nowadays. For achieving high productivity in practically any kind of activity it is necessary to own a certain set of data, knowledge, ideas of the business communication rules.
The culture of business communication promotes the establishment and development of the relations of cooperation and partnership between people, in many respects defining the efficiency of the relations: whether these relations will be successfully implemented in the interests of partners or will become empty, inefficient, and even will absolutely stop if partners don’t find mutual understanding.
For the purpose of achieving a high level of the language competence development it is necessary:
- to form the conditions for the development of students’ informative activity through the use of new educational technologies, active forms of education (slides on the set subjects, video topics, etc.);
- to promote the development of students’ oral and written language by means of active forms of education (selection of monological texts in technical specialties);
- to promote the disclosure and realization of each student’s creative potential.
- to develop the linguistic, communicative, culture studying (linguistic county studying, ethnic culture studying, socio-cultural competence.
It is necessary to introduce actively in practice of teaching languages communicative technologies, as much as possible using the authentic training materials, new information technologies and methodological approaches (the method of projects, educational role-playing games, testing, discussions, oral and written presentations, etc.) that promotes the development of skills of critical judgment, the formation of abilities to act publicly, to conduct polemics, to estimate critically and to master the material creatively. And this, in turn, is the most important factor of successful professional activity of a future expert.
So, for example, at the chair of the Russian language and speech culture of Karaganda State Technical University it is developed and constantly improved the educational and methodological complex including the program, the working plan, as well as manuals containing texts with tasks aimed at the stage-by-stage formation of abilities of professional communication needed for the effective activity in the sphere of professional foreign-language interaction.
The selection of the language and speech material in the presented manuals is carried out taking into account the difficulties of this material assimilation and its importance for communication.
The proposed profession-focused texts are topical, informative and induce students to vigorous communicative activity in the specialty sphere. Alongside with the informative and general education value, the text material is to act not only as an information source, but also to contain statements on a problem with elements of comparison, reasoning, justification of a certain point of view. Each text has the pretext tasks representing lexical and grammatical exercises, explaining and fixing the most difficult grammatical phenomena, tasks for revising the taught language material; text tasks, setup questions premised to the authentic text; posttext tasks in the form of the questions checking understanding of the main information of the text and tasks for drawing up different types of the text plans, etc.
Thus, teaching to extract and understand information assumes the enrichment of students with special knowledge and specialty perspective, understanding of its advantage and need for further professional communication. All this finally allows forming the language base of students training. Training specialists at technical colleges consists in the formation of communicative abilities which would allow carrying out professional contacts in various spheres and situations, to form the future expert’s aspiration and ability to function as a strong language personality of the democratic type possessing a high linguistic competence in the sphere of languages, in professionally significant speech events of different types, in various modes, registers, forms, styles, types and genres of profession-focused speaking-and-thinking activity.
This finally expands the competence of a specialist-graduate of the present day higher school, makes him competitive at the modern labor market.
The work is submitted to the International Scientific Conference “Modern sociology and education”, London, October 18–25, 2014 came to the editorial office оn 11.09.2014.
Библиографическая ссылка
Оspanova B.R., Azimbayeva Z.А. About the Role of Language and Communicative Competence in Training Experts // Международный журнал экспериментального образования. – 2014. – № 9. – С. 33-34;URL: https://expeducation.ru/ru/article/view?id=6391 (дата обращения: 19.04.2024).