Multilingual Training of Technical University Students: Sound Arguments

Sound arguments are given in support of a multilingual approach to teaching foreign languages in technical universities, which allows not declarative, but the real formation of multilingual communicative competence (“MCC”) of future engineers. Scientific-technical cooperation, as well as the expansion of international contacts in the field of engineering determine the need for specialists who speak the leading languages of international communication and can maintain professional and business communication in several foreign languages in further international integration. The relevance of this study is determined by the necessity to form an elite linguistic personality of an engineer with a highly developed technical and linguistic intelligence. The degree of importance of the proposed research is confirmed by the need for the development and implementation of multilingual educational programs aimed at foreign students as well. The number of the latter is rapidly increasing due to the growing popularity of Russian universities. Since the possession of a foreign language communicative competence in modern conditions is moving into the field of multilingualism, special attention in the professional training of a promising resource capacity of future engineers should be paid to the multilingual communicative competence formed in the course of multilingual education. The aim of the study is the theoretical substantiation and practical development of componential content of the MCC and the procedure for its formation, as well as experimental verification of the effectiveness of multilingual education of engineering students. The sources of multilingual education, which originate from the experience of prominent scientists involved in the development of modern methods of teaching the second and subsequent foreign languages, are identified on the basis of communicative-cognitive, intercultural and other approaches. The integrative nature of multilingual communicative competence is considered, its structural complex consisting of basic and complementary components is analyzed. The statistical data analysis, undertaken using the IBM SPSS Statistics 22 program, allows solving the main task of the experimental study, which is to determine the effect of multilingual education of undergraduate, specialist and graduate students on learning outcomes in each language studied. For this, the differences between the level of proficiency in each foreign language in the experimental and control groups are considered in sequence. At the bachelor’s and specialist degree levels, measurements and analysis are carried out in two foreign languages, at the master’s degree level - in three foreign languages. The values obtained in the experimental study indicate a positive effect of multilingual education of students studying at a technical university on the results for each language studied (FL1, FL2, FL3) at all educational levels.

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