UPDATING OF BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSE CONTENT AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE FORMATION IN A NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY
A communicative competence is a crucial part of professional competence of any university student as well as a non-linguistic university student. A foreign language communicative competence is an aspect of communicative competence, and such courses as «General English», «Translation of Specialized Texts» and «Business English» help form it. There are a number of academic papers, investigating the problem of course content updating for English in professional communication sphere. They generally study the problems of specialized texts work, teaching translation, gaining subject-oriented lexis, but not the content of Business English course (BE). This paper investigates and generalizes research papers devoted to these issues, choses the most popular Business English coursebooks by world-famous publishers, such as Cambridge, Macmillan, Oxford. Intelligent Business, Business Result, In Company, New Market Leader and Business Start-up, Pre-intermediate level, have been chosen for the analysis. Then we compare the proposed topics for studying and language skills for formation, and, considering their frequency of occurrence, employers demand, and university teachers and students opinion when answering the question «What Business English skills are absolutely necessary for a university graduate?», we have worked out an approximate Business English course content for Elementary/ Elementary+ students of a non-linguistic university and improving their foreign language communicative competence, taking into account short study time. We consider these results to help form a competent in business communication in particular and a professionally competent in general, graduate. The results may also be of use for creating practice-oriented academic and additional materials for Business English classes usage, Pre-Intermediate level.