Market-Oriented LSP Training in Higher Education: Towards Higher Communicative Skills

Abstract

In the 21 st century globalization accelerates the need for English communication skills as English is recognized as a lingua franca in the business world. A high priority of university educators involved in LSP (LSP -language for special purposes) training is to equip graduates with communicative LSP skills meeting the standards of huge and increasingly competitive job market. The study addresses the issue on how to close the current gap between prospective employers' expectations of English communication skills level and the existing LSP level of graduates. The study aims at, first, to reveal the effect of English globalization on employability from the perspective of university students; second, to identify factors leading to reticence in speaking; and third, to provide a solution to the problem of gap between graduates' oral skills and employers' expectations. The study uses two questionnaires as an instrument to collect data. The obtained quantitative data is used as an input for qualitative study. The study certifies that undergraduates are fully aware of the utmost importance of English language for employment. Also, the study identifies the main social and psycholinguistic reasons hindering to develop speaking skills in the university settings. Further, the research findings have been used to develop and integrate into university training curricula an intensive 3-module program meeting the real needs of students and business community. The goal of this program is to equip students with excellent English communication skills meeting the rapidly changing job market demands. The findings of the study suggest that LSP training offered at higher school should be improved to meet job market requirements. The study enabled to assess the instruction results and provide a solution to the problem of "competency gap". It points to where the real work of closing the gap between the need for workforce skilled in English communication and actual graduates' skill level needs to happen.

Language for Specific Purposes and Audio Description Tasks: A Case Study

“…This paper offers an innovative didactic proposal of Audio Description (AD) in the English for Tourism (ET) classroom. It supports the hypothesis that authentic tasks enhance communicative skills in LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) education (Melnichuk et al 2017). It presents a quasi-experimental study of student performance in two different productive tasks (writing and speaking).…”

“…The new app will include student recordings to provide ET students with a support tool and a wide range of videos to keep practicing AD methodology outside the classroom. Furthermore, new tasks will be available, so that future students may have more opportunities to implement a communicative project-based methodology in other ESP domains (Melnichuk et al 2017). By using voice recording, they will also be able to rehearse their performance and measure their productive competences.…”

“…Recientemente, en el aula de Lengua Extranjera (LE) se ha implantado la descripción de vídeos y el doblaje para el desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas a través de diversos métodos didácticos (Vermeulen e Ibáñez 2014Talaván 2020; Ávila-Cabrera y Rodríguez-Arancón 2021). El presente artículo muestra la práctica de la Audio Descripción (AD) en el ámbito del lenguaje de especialidad (LSP, en inglés), con el fin de comprobar la efectividad de incluir actividades comunicativas auténticas en el aula de enseñanza de LSP (Melnichuk et al 2017), y que a la vez englobe tareas (TBL). De este modo se propone la AD con fines didácticos.…”

Difficulties and Strategies in Learning English: An Analysis of Students From English and Non-English Education Department in Indonesia

“…According to Melnichuk, Osipova, and Kondrakhina, speaking in front of the classroom will make students go blank, fail to control the audiences, and the students will forget their linea. They also inform that shyness involved in applying English speaking skill in real context is because the students lack confidence, so it will make students nervous and uncomfortable [49]. e) Listening.…”

Teaching foreign languages in Slovakia (1918 – 2018)

“…During the transition to a market economy, the importance of English immediately became abundantly clear, and this resulted in a veritable boom in its learning and teaching (cf. Krechetnikov, Pestereva, 2017;Melnichuk et al, 2017).…”