Communicative Competence Formation of Future Officers in the Process of Foreign Language Training

Abstract

Modernization of the military system and its content has enhanced the value of the foreign language as a subject aimed at the formation of communicative competence of future officers. It mainly concerns a professional language, which is an obligatory part of the cadets' professional training. One of the main tasks of foreign language training of future officers is to form the communicative competency in the spheres of professional and situational communication as well as to learn new professional information from foreign sources. Based on the stated above, the author developed the methodology of forming communicative competence of future officers in the process of foreign language training with the active implementation of informational communicative technologies and computer means of teaching: the virtual reality, military-professional games, role play stimulators, and other software, within which a dialogue appeared. The last is regarded as an active message exchange between participants of the educational process or a user and the information system in real-time. The use of informational communicative technologies has enabled instant access to remoted module informational resources, synchronous (asynchronous) communication between subjects of the educational process. It has also provided new opportunities for testing, administration, and cooperation. The experimental usage of the author's methodology was implemented into the teaching process of the subject “Foreign language” based on the intercultural educational environment as a set of immersion, virtual, interactive, and discourse educational environments. The analysis of the obtained results and objective consideration of the dynamics of the changes in the formation of communicative competence of future officers have been done through the integrated test (targeted monitoring, a set of adapted tests application, an online survey, a questionnaire, case study, situational modelling, individual and group interviews) and methods of mathematical statistics. The conducted study has proved the efficiency of the author’s methodology implementation based on the intercultural educational environment of higher military education establishments. The proposed methodology can be successfully used in the process of foreign language training of various specialists because its main strategic orientation is to form communicative competence and abilities for intercultural communication among students (cadets).