TEACHING PUBLIC SPEAKING IN THE ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES COURSE THROUGH BLENDED LEARNING

Speaking skills were rated by university students as one of the most necessary and important for their future. professional lives, but at the same time, as the most underdeveloped and challenging for mastering, according to the research, the British Council has conducted in the framework of its 'English for Universities' project and published in 2017. Our further research among the students majoring in Economic Studies has highlighted public speaking skills as priority skills for future marketeers and managers. Unfortunately, we faced the situation, when former school leavers, current students of our. university, understand public speaking as reading out loud the text written on the sheet of paper and accompanying such kind of delivery with chunks of texts put on the slides. The amount of challenge was added by the 204 hours, allotted for the English for Specific Purposes course. Therefore, we combined available digital resources and interactive classroom. approaches to give an opportunity to our students to master such significant competency as public speaking skills. We have analysed with them plenty of presentations accessible on YouTube, including TED talks, in terms of materials selection,. delivery techniques, 'hooking' techniques, using intonation, appropriate structuring, using functional language, creating. visuals and referring to them during the delivery. Methods of flipped classroom were used as well, when students were reading on the Internet about the tips on how their presentations can be improved and creating a list of criteria for a successful presentation, using online Rubric creators, such as RubiStar. Developed criteria were used for preparation of their. own presentations and further self- and peer- evaluation. We removed the terminology with negative collocation and. succeeded to change students' attitude to feedback of their peers. This approach has not only improved the quality of. students' presentations, but also enhanced intrinsic motivation of them. The indicator of that was a 10% increase in average. grade of the group under experiment.