Innovation in Language Learning

The presented research features a study in applied linguistics that is both research- and experience-based in the framework of LSP and focuses innovations in the methodology of teaching English for Specific Purposes to undergraduate and post-graduate students at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and Kharkiv National University of Construction and Architecture (Ukraine). The research is based on several years of consistent research exercised by a linguist (A.V. Legeyda) and a mathematician (D.V. Legeyda) (possessing respectively 16 and 20 years’ experience of academic teaching) and involves a substantial amount of respondents’ matter. In the Soviet and Post-Soviet academic epoch “English for Specific Purposes” course in the above-mentioned educational establishments was limited to 90 minutes per week and was largely shaped as a symbiosis of presentating grammar and technical lexis in a particular subject field, the principal students’ objective being to exercise successful reading and translating of the suggested texts from international publications (reading and translating being the only skills focused). Confronting the impending epoch of new technologies, the long-existing LSP Soviet teaching paradigm remained , depriving most of Soviet and Post-Soviet scientists of the ability to benefit from international academic exchange largely achieved through spoken communication at conferences, etc. Facing this problem we pioneered a project involving an experiment based on implementing an innovative teaching methodology in the framework of Content-based Instruction that introduced totally new to the previously existing system academic strategies and tools. The experiment revolved around groups of students that were supplied with a set of textual (conference proceedings, journals, etc.)/audial/visual (TED TALKS, etc.) academic materials targeted at motivating them for the orl and written discussion of the up-to-date scientific issues within their professional field, as well as at introducing minor grammar correction (reading, speaking, listening, writing skills focus), rather than focusing bulks of grammar disconnected from scientific reality. Students were only encouraged to cover grammar areas that stood essential for their academic English expertise: passive and subjunctive mood in scientific papers, the grammar and style of abstracts, etc. The experiment resulted in greater respondents’ satisfaction and the enhanced rate of their international conference participation.