Vol 2, No 2 (2021)

The problem of finding the most appropriate, sophisticated or innovative approach, technology and method of teaching English for specific purposes has always drawn the specialists’ attention. Nowadays a promising graduate of any educational institution is to be able to establish professional communication not only in the native language, but also in a foreign one. A graduate of a military academy is not an exception. Peacekeeping operations, joint military exercises, international exhibitions, war games require military specialists, who are able to react to standard and non-standard professional communicative situations. The author focuses on the necessity of professionally oriented approach to language teaching and the definition of the language for specific purposes. Special attention is paid to the notion of assessment and its peculiarities at the ESP class. Apart from being communicative, systematic, diagnostic, developing and educational, assessment is also to be professionally-oriented, so existing methods of it should be modified to meet the requirements of the future profession. This research paper is aimed at identifying the advantages of quest-oriented form of assessment over the traditional one and proving with the help of the experiment that quest is one of the most appropriate forms of evaluating the students’ progress at the ESP class. The methods of the research include observations on language competency development (80 students were observed throughout two years); comparative analysis of examination results. The experiment has shown that quest-oriented assessment creates the situations of professional communication in the most realistic way. Such designed situations of profession-oriented communication enable a teacher to assess the level of skill development and enhance students’ motivation. The author presents the models of tasks involving all language skills that can be adapted to other professional spheres. The outcomes of this research may be of high value to teachers who are dedicated to creating appropriate and effective assessment for ESP classes.

The paper tackles the issue of forming a basis of intercultural competence for young learners. Considering the fact that we live in the globalized world and in the era of communication technologies this issue is becoming more and more acute. It is getting incredibly easy to explore other nations and cultures either by travelling or by using social media. This fact has greatly influenced foreign language teaching. The goals of this paper are to develop the theoretical construct of intercultural competence for young learners, to analyze the current English textbooks – both Russian and authentic ones – on the matter of knowledge, skills ,and abilities that are represented and formed in them, and to compare the theoretical and practical results of the research: What is lacking? What can be added? As a research method, a theoretical analysis of the academic literature is used. Analyzing the educational documents, the theory of socio-cultural competence developed by Doctor Victoria Safonova and M. Byram’s theory of intercultural communication, I found out that it needs to be specified for young learners. As a result, the construct of intercultural competence for young learners is developed. The construct includes a set of knowledge, skills, acquired practices, abilities and attitudes. Furthermore, this construct might be useful for creating a set of tasks for developing young learners’ intercultural competence. Second, the current English textbooks, both Russian and English ones, were analyzed according to the knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes represented in them. Then the author of the paper compared the practical construct from the English textbooks with the theoretical one by searching for the areas where intercultural competence might be developed more fully. As one of the possibilities to teach intercultural communication to young learners the author suggests organizing cultural – exchange between Russian and English-speaking students trough project work. Such work will allow students to deepen their intercultural knowledge and practice their cultural observation by comparing different cultures.

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