PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCES OF IT-STUDENTS AND THEIR DEVELOPMENT IN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGE

An onrush of social, economic and political development and expansion of international relations have caused the changes in the higher engineering education system. To fit the times in training highly qualified engineers, the universities shall develop and introduce such courses and teaching technologies which would promote development of professional-oriented abilities of the students. Among these abilities can be knowledge, practical skills and social experience that form firm ground for professional and cultural competences development, set as the result of education in the State Educational Standards. In the article foreign language teaching is considered as a process able to influence the effective development of IT-students' competences. The significance of knowing a foreign language, particularly English, is beyond any doubt, especially for IT-students. The development of professional competences determines, as a rule, the profession content and its needs. We singled out some professional activities that require good command in English. It allowed to define some preferable learning activities based on modeling or simulation of real situations of professional communication, which facilitates the process of students' competence development. The key competences are as follows: ability to express ideas logically and clearly in oral and written form of professional communication, good command in English, ability to collect, process and sort out scientific and technical information, ability of critical or lateral thinking, self-education, ability to solve communicative tasks, and others. The analysis of IT-industry needs, specialists' key competences and content of English teaching resulted in designing a matrix of relation. Visualized data allowed to define the special teaching (didactic) conditions that would provide the process of competences development in learning English more effectively. These conditions can be, for example: 1) syllabus development based on the integration of general and special disciplines; 2) course content focused on the education result, expressed in the State Educational Standards; 3) information technologies used in teaching as a tool of collecting, processing and presenting information; 4) educational technologies that are variable and diverse based on the interaction and flexibility principles, on modeling or simulation of situations of real professional communication, on individual and differentiate approach to teaching.