PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS AS A SOURCE FOR DEVELOPING PROFESSION-ORIENTED TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Modern contexts of professional activities are dynamically developing. As a result, foreign languages departments need to specify the contents of foreign languages curricular through revealing specific features of professional communication of specialists in various fields, as well as those who perform different functions within the same enterprise. To provide high quality training of students in the field of foreign languages so that they could meet modern requirements, professional communication of specialists at their working places should be taken into consideration because professional activities are being constantly diversified. Besides, along with purely ontological aspects, social, communicative, organizational and gnoseological aspects of communication should be considered. It is very important to simulate in the classroom real situations of professional communication relevant for graduates. This increases interest to context-based, project-based, and similar methods/technologies of teaching. The paper describes role plays and project-based tasks that develop students’ foreign language oral and written communicative skills, engage them in authentic communication, enrich their ideas of the future professional duties, allow them to participate in designing the best contents and methods of profession-oriented foreign language education. Means of revealing foreign language profession-oriented communicative requirements to employees of various positions are gaining importance. Among those means are observing, questionnaire design, job interviews, vacancy announcements for engineering jobs, communication skills testing, etc.