TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR ENGINEERING GRADUATES

Mastering foreign language for professional purposes is declared at Russian universities as the main goal of a language teaching in the magistracy. Yet often these courses repeat the ones that have been practiced in a bachelor education with only few excursions into semi-professional areas. As a result, master students are bored getting merely linguistic information but find the specialist discourse relevant to their science researches almost impenetrable. The paper suggests that an integrative method of teaching workplace English through discussing highly specified professional topics is not less effective than general around-science discussions. The innovative method suggests specially designed curriculum with its focus on "proper context" of terms, principles of reading/writing a scientific paper, solving problems, etc. For the assessment of acquiring English scientific literacy of engineering graduates a complex criterion is introduced. Due attention is paid to the graduates' self-assessment of their own progress with professional English. The paper presents the results of a two-year experimental study, highlights the problems and perspectives.