Educational online technologies as effective tools for learning English terminology of language for specific purposes (LSP) by the students of non-linguistic university specialties: interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

The paper describes the research conducted by the team of the English teachers of English for Humanities Dpt. of Southern federal university. The investigation aimed at the study of effectiveness of learning English terminology for special purposes by the non-linguistics university program students with the help of IT-technologies. In the experiment the online course "Legal Communication: Legal Writing and Oral Communication in the Practice of Law", developed by the interdisciplinary team of university teachers of the Faculty of Law and the English teachers of English for Humanities Dpt. on the Moodle LMS. Interdisciplinary approach applied in the course of investigation embraced the main principles of two sciences: methods of teaching foreign languages and terminology study. The results obtained show that both the usage of educational IT-technologies and the educational IT- products increases the students’ motivation for learning the language of their future profession if the content of the educational IT- products is thoroughly developed on the main subjects of theoretical and practical terminology study: the description of the history of formation and development of a language for special purposes, the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that influenced its development, its vocabulary, style and genres, the techniques of appropriate use of terms in the special context.