THE IMPACT OF TECHNICAL STUDENTS' COGNITIVE CHARACTERISTICS ON LEARNING FRENCH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES.

Abstract

The article deals with the question of teaching French for specific purposes to the students of technical specialties. The authors analyze the influence of language and speaking skills, the impact of future engineers’ individual differences of cognitive, emotional, social, situational levels, including learning styles on the effectiveness of the process of intercultural competence formation. The language is a complex cognitive skill that’s why the process of French for Specific Purposes mastering can be described within the context of the cognitive theory. It was determined that the process of professionally oriented language learning is associated with speaking skills and cognitive peculiarities characterized, reflected in verbal structures that they use, in preferred ways of the information perception, treatment, reproduction and production, in some modes to retain new information. These peculiarities can be explained by the dominant functions of right or left-hemispheric strategies of the individual. The research showed that the majority of future specialists of technical sphere have an analytical style which is manifested in the preference for the sequential information processing that enhances perception, comprehension, learning and retention of this information. Some educational strategies for the future engineers learning style flexibility have been presented. The authors also propose some exercises for the formation of intercultural communication competence of future specialists of the technical sphere where the aforementioned their cognitive peculiarities and speaking skills resulting from different factors have been taken into consideration.