Methodological System of Future Engineers' Multilingual Training: An Empirical Research

Abstract

Training of highly qualified engineering personnel capable of solving professional tasks in a multilingual international environment is one of the main goals implemented within the framework of the national project known as “Education”. Expanding the range of languages taught and modernizing the approaches to teaching foreign languages can change the attitude to linguistic education in technical universities making it multifunctional, relevant to the time and more attractive for both Russian and international students. This article analyzes the methodological system of multilingual training of technical students elaborated by Anna A. Prokhorova and summarizes the results of an empirical study conducted on the basis of one of the leading Russian technical universities. The study aimed at examining the effectiveness of the proposed methodological system. The authors consider the latter to be a compound educational structure of a humanitarian nature, which is aimed at developing a multilingual communicative competence (MCC) among students of engineering specialties as well as their multicultural personality. MCC is interpreted from the perspective of the idea proposed by Konstantin E. Bezukladnikov, who offers to formulate it in terms of ‘readiness' and ‘ability'. Thus, the authors give the definition and describe the structural complex of the multilingual communicative competence, which includes basic and complementary components. The authors also stress that a multilingual educational process in a technical university is possible only in specific conditions that promote systematic language learning. In this regard, they suggest the idea of creating the architecture of a multilingual environment that is built on the principles of mobility, integration and digitalization. The methodological system of multilingual training was implemented and its efficiency was verified via experimental work with more than a thousand student participants majoring in various fields of engineering and belonging to dissimilar learning paths. The multilingual skills of the participants were diagnosed through observation, surveys, and modern methods of analyzing multilingual educational activities. The obtained indicators were recorded and discussed. The achieved results proved to be positive due to the introduction of multilingual modules such as facilitative, accelerative, communicative and transferable, presented by the authors. The statistical data analysis performed using the IBM SPSS Statistics program confirms the effectiveness of the implemented system and proves that its integration into the content of technical students' foreign language teaching is really promising.