Developing foreign language communicative competence of engineering students within university extracurricular activities

Abstract

The topic of the study is the analysis of forms of extracurricular work that contribute to the formation of foreign language communication competence among engineering students. The main tasks of the research are to identify the levels of formation of components of foreign language communicative competence among engineering students, the desire to work on self-improvement outside the classroom workload. Theoretical, empirical, statistical and mathematical methods have been used to conduct the empirical study. The participants were 64 students of the Educational-Scientific Institute of Mechanical Engineering, Technology and Transport of Chernihiv National University of Technology. The most popular language for learning among students is English. The majority of respondents (52%) have a medium level of foreign language proficiency; almost half of the students (43%) stated elementary level and only 5% of respondents have a high level of foreign language knowledge. However, the cultural component of students' foreign language communication competence is even less developed. The results obtained have given the ground for searching new forms of extracurricular work with engineering students. The authors identified the prospect forms of extracurricular work with such category of students, particularly: English cinema club, English Board Games Club, student Cultural Center, student culinary studio, hand-made studio, theatre studio, art studio, studio of additive technologies, student international fraternity, etc. Further study requires experimental verification of the effectiveness of the suggested forms of extracurricular work.