Teaching English to students who plan to participate in volunteer projects abroad

The ideas of humanism, tolerance, social responsibility, and altruism are getting widespread in modern society. Volunteering is becoming more powerful, and the number of professional volunteers and people interested in joining social missions is increasing. The development of volunteering is currently one of the priorities of state policy in Russia, which is aimed at ensuring social justice, democracy, protection of human rights and freedoms. The idea of supporting volunteerism is reflected in several federal and national projects, government programs, the activities of government bodies, and non-governmental organizations. There exists special interest in expanding the scale of international interaction on volunteering to develop public diplomacy and consolidate the efforts of volunteers from different countries to implement joint projects and initiatives. Volunteer projects are increasingly becoming international in nature and require professionals who speak a foreign language at a level sufficient for effective work. Educational organizations play a significant role in making volunteering more popular. They train volunteers to participate in social projects since they work as centers for the exchange of knowledge and have a high social inclusion. Students studying “Education and Pedagogical Sciences” and “Sociology and Social Work” play an important role in the acquisition of knowledge about volunteerism at the international level, its subsequent use, and transfer to students, colleagues, and specialists. Preservice teachers should have enough skills to educate their students by inviting them to social projects. Social workers need to deepen their existing knowledge to work together with colleagues from abroad, transfer the accumulated experience and improve the efficiency of solving social problems in this country. Despite the development of volunteering and the support of international cooperation on volunteering in this country, there is a lack of professional language training for university students who could use the knowledge to participate in international volunteering. It becomes an obstacle in achieving the designated state goals and stops many interested students from participating in social projects due to the lack of proper language and subject training. This makes it important to develop a methodology for teaching English, the international language of business communication, for university students to participate in international volunteer projects. Integration of modern educational resources into the educational process is becoming a logical and natural part of the increasing penetration of Internet technologies into all spheres of human life, including education. Their use makes it possible to overcome the problem of epidemiological lockdown, ensures the principle of accessibility of education for people living in different parts of the world, allows learners to study without taking up a lot of time, and meets the needs of the younger generation in using ICT opportunities in learning. The Internet allows teachers to implement many pedagogical ideas. It works as the main source of obtaining authentic materials in the target language and allows them to master all types of speech activities in an interactive form. However, despite the variety of available information and electronic educational resources, it is important to find the best suitable electronic educational platform to place the foreign language training courses for international volunteering and conduct them effectively. The article presents the experience of organizing English language training for students to participate in the international volunteering using the linguistic educational platform Progress.me as means of developing communicative competence and subject preparation of volunteers to participate in international social projects and exchange professional knowledge in a convenient and flexible format. The article presents a methodology underlying the study. It notes the main principles and methods of organizing training in the concept of vocationally-oriented training as fundamental in the development of an author's training course. The article also indicates the approaches to teaching languages taken into account in the research. It describes the importance of the integrated approach for research which ensures the required level of communicative competence of students in a short time. The article introduces the thematic planning of the course and the advantages of using the platform for the implementation of individual methodological ideas of the authors. It evaluates the effectiveness of professional training with mathematical statistics tools. It also describes teaching methods used for the most popular classes among students. The study finds out that the developed training methodology is effective and has value for subsequent use in order to prepare volunteers to participate in international volunteer projects.

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