Title screen

Teaching foreign languages for professional purposes is considered to be the priority in updating engineering education in Russia. The ability to communicate in other languages is becoming the integral part of professional competence of any specialist, no difference what field he/she works in. With changing the requirements to specialist training there is a need to overhaul the content and approaches to teaching foreign languages, profession focused, to nonlinguistic students. In the framework of the project «Modernization of the language education in nonlinguistic universities», supported by the Federal Education Budget Programme for 2009-2013, there was carried out some correlation measures reducing «weaknesses» of the existing language education system taking into account the world advanced practices. In the result 9 overseas universities (5 European and 4 Asian ones) were analyzed with the aim at identifying approaches to language teaching including content development and methods. 180 courses offered by different universities were reviewed. The obtained results emphasized the relevance of this area for higher education and allowed to follow the dynamic of its development in the world scale; created the foundation to classify the best practices to teaching and learning professional languages and to reorganize approaches to its running.