USE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF INTEGRATED METHODS IN TEACHING AEROSPACE SPECIALISTS ENGLISH FOR SCIENTIFIC PURPOSES
- Authors: Shumakova N.A1
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Affiliations:
- Reshetnev Siberian State Aerospace University
- Issue: Vol 16, No 3 (2015)
- Pages: 632-637
- Section: Articles
- URL: https://journals.eco-vector.com/2712-8970/article/view/503060
- ID: 503060
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Abstract
The article considers the content of the course of post graduate students’ training in a foreign language for scientific purposes in a technical university of aerospace profile. The experience of work in the context of SibSAU training of young scientists to effectively functioning in an international professional scientific community is analyzed. The experience of work in connection with the growing trend of writing scientific texts (articles, publications, monographs, etc.) in a foreign language (English) is presented. A complex structure of work with postgraduate students in teaching a foreign language for scientific purposes is developed and presented. Particular attention is paid to the integration of Internet resources in the process of preparing for the candidate's exam in a foreign language, and subsequent publications in international scientific systems such as Web of Science, Scopus. The article reflects the experience of testing and implementation of various Internet sources, presents the most effective ones. High cognitive professionally-oriented and didactic potential of the Internet technologies used is marked.Particular attention is paid to the scientific search systems, allowing a full-text search on articles of major foreign publishers’ magazines, articles in the archives of articles and preprints, scientific resources of Internet. Links for work with authentic scientific periodicals, modern dictionaries and encyclopedias are proposed. The article maybe of interest to postgraduate students of technical universities of aerospace profile, preparing for the successful functioning in the scientific community in order to accommodate their publications in leading peer-reviewed journals, as well as for foreign language teachers using in integrated methods in teaching a foreign language for scientific purposes.
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Introduction. Implementation of information and communication technology in the academic activity and scientific research process is an essential requirement for the realization of the RF Higher Education Modernization Conception. In the perspective of formation of innovative economics in the context of this Conception it is necessary to update technologies constantly, use advanced mastering of innovations and rapidly adapt for the demands of dynamic world. It is important to remember that the key element of global competition is an availability of high quality education [1]. Nowadays there is a great need for aerospace industry specialists to have a good command of a foreign language for scientific purposes. The level of language proficiency is an important criterion of aerospace industry specialists’ professionalism as there is a necessity to deal with foreign colleagues, obtain information from international scientific sources, participate in international scientific events and to publish the results of their researches in the peer-reviewed journals with high citation index. The knowledge of English for scientific purposes enables young researchers to transfer the results of the performed researches to the international level. Nowadays SibSAU’s researchers actively participate in international scientific and academic projects. Scientific contacts with our foreign colleagues have become numerous. All the above mentioned factors caused the necessity of English for scientific purposes skills development. In this case English for scientific purposes is considered as a means of obtaining adequate modern knowledge from scientific professional sphere [2]. Integration of Internet Resources. As a result of learning a course of English for scientific purposes post graduates should get the experience of large volume of authentic texts (monographs, scientific articles, reports of international specialists) processing. They should be able to write a grant proposal in order to participate in scientific conferences, to draw up application forms for conferences. The methodology of teaching English for scientific purposes is connected with effective planning and organizing both classroom activities and independent students’ activity. The academic content of English for scientific purposes course in this context is one of the most important elements of the integral structure of academic process planning. In connection with this there is a need for analyzing pedagogical and methodological terms, contributing the efficiency of training. In SibSAU great experience of work with post graduates on foreign languages for scientific purposes is accumulated. Working with postgraduates in this field we use complex approach. Further we’ll dwell upon the main elements of this complex in more details. In particular these elements are practical and theoretical at different stages of the course. Special attention herein will be paid to the results and the forms of control. Key concepts and terms introduced. At the overview lecture we usually introduce the key concepts and terms used by the participants of the publishing activity. The educator’s task here is to prepare a postgraduate student for further publications in the international peer-reviewed sources included in the Web of Science and Scopus. Here are the examples of the things being introduced. Web of Knowledge is the largest searching platform uniting scientific articles, patents, websites and conferences’ materials. Web of Science is the component of Web of Knowledge platform providing access to scientific articles in different fields. Scopus is a bibliographical abstracts’ database allowing following citation ratio. Impact factor is a quantitative index reflecting the level of scientific journal registered in the Web of Science. It shows average number of citations of each article published in two years after its publication and is a proportion of the number of the article citations to the number of all the articles published in this journal. Hirsch index is a quantitative index evaluating a scientist, a group of researches or a scientific organization. Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) is a national information analytical system accumulating more than 4.7 million publications if national authors and containing information about citation of these publications from more than 4000 Russian journals. It is intended not only for effective provision of scientific researches with urgent indicative bibliographical information, but is also an effective tool allowing appreciating the results of the scientific research organizations and scientists activity and the level of the scientific journal. Preparation of the presentation has a special place during classes for post graduates. One of the topics for such presentations is “My dissertation proposal” where they reinforce the skills on formulating the topic, object and subject of the research; present its main tasks in English. Another example of the presentation is “Peer-reviewed journals of Scopus and Web of Science systems in my field of research”. Here the postgraduates present different journals in their field of study paying special attention to the terms of publishing. Another important element of the course is teaching preparing a resume “My researcher’s profile”, writing annotated bibliography and abstract in English. Public presentation of the report is a final part of the course and assessment tool. Reasons for integration of Internet resources. One of the most available optimization tools in the field of teaching postgraduates English for scientific purposes is integration of Internet resources into the academic process in technical university of aerospace profile. Internet resources have already become an integral part of the educational process in SibSAU. These tools started to be actively used in 2006-2007. It should be noted that the use of the Internet greatly influences the technology of delivery information to the postgraduate students. In these terms the role of independent work is increasing and the autonomy of studying is developing. The use of Internet for teaching English for scientific purposes amid the global economic crises becomes justified, as it reduces expenses on paying for supplementary education (foreign language courses), buying expensive authentic textbooks and monographs which get out of date and loose novelty very quickly. Besides, electronic publications provide achievement of four basic advantages: international accessibility, speed, additional facilities and low cost [3]. Information and communication technologies create new global environment, mediating a great number of Internet resources, supplying academic and scientific information in foreign (English) language. In the methodology of teaching Foreign languages there exists a new direction such as e-learning having been developed both by foreign and national researchers. Internet resources enable to teach all types of speech activity, though teaching writing and reading are higher-priority ones. Great number of Internet resources was investigated by the specialists of SibSAU. Some useful scientific search systems, catalogues and back files of scientific periodicals were revealed and could be recommended to the masters and postgraduates of various directions in their work with authentic textbooks, journals, monographs etc. Scientific searching systems recommended. Both while preparing for passing their candidate exam in English and in the process of conducting the research post graduates spend a lot of time on searching and translating monographs on their specialty, work with a glossary, writing abstracts of authentic scientific materials. Besides they are to publish the results of their researches in the peer reviewed journals of such systems as Scopus and Web of science. In this connection it is proposed to study those electronic recourses which could be useful for them at our lessons. In our opinion special attention should be paid to the following searching systems. ScienceDirect is home to almost one-quarter of the world’s peer-reviewed full-text scientific, technical and medical content. Over 15 million researchers, health care professionals, teachers, students and information professionals around the globe rely on ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2.500 journals and more than 26.000 book titles. ScienceDirect supports research and education with interactive elements in articles such as audio, video, graphs, tables and images, and offers tools so users can keep current with research trends. Content on ScienceDirect also features embedded links to external datasets, including earth and environmental science data from PANGAEA, abstract and indexing data from Scopus and chemical reactions data from Reaxys. With over 12.6 million content pieces available - including pre-publication articles and open access content from Elsevier journals - ScienceDirect is a premier platform for discovering the world of research [4]. Google Scholar is also a scientific searching system. GS index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of the world's largest scientific publishers, preprints’ archives, publications at universities’, scientific societies’ and other scientific organizations’ sites. GS allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether they are online or in libraries [5]. Through its “cited by” feature, GS provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed [6]. It searches the articles both in English and in Russian. What is more important it calculates publications’ citation index and allows finding the articles containing references for those which had been already published. Science Research Portal is a scientific searching system scanning a full text search in magazines of large scientific publishers, such as Elsevier, Highwire, IEEE, Nature, Taylor &Francis. It scans articles and documents in the open databases such as: Directory of Open Access Journals, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Science.gov and Scientific News. Windows Live Academic is Microsoft’s beta software. It is targeted for the search of scientific articles both in open sources and paywall archives of publications. At the moment the system includes the articles in physics, computer technologies, electrical technology and allied subjects. Sources for the search of scientific articles. Dealing with annotated bibliographies it is necessary to investigate numerous sources of scientific information. Here we propose such links as: - DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is a catalogue of more than 1463 free access journals. The retrospection is from the year 2000. A new version of DOAJ includes records on the level of articles and allows searching the articles in all Open Access Journals. Now through theDirectory of Open Access Journals the researchers can carry out the search on 46000 articles with a guarantee of getting access to the articles’ texts [7]; - World Newspapers is a catalogue of English language newspapers, magazines and news’ sites published all over the world. The search is conducted according to the title of a periodical and their abstracts. One can choose the publication either according to the subject headlines or according to the country of a publication [8]; - JSTOR is a database of academic articles and a scholarly journal archive. It both creates and keeps an available archive of important scientific journals and offers access of agreat number of researchers to it.JSTOR permits the researchers the opportunity to extract scan high-resolution images of journals’ issues and separate pages of the journals in their original appearance (how they were composed, printed and illustrated) [9]. Doubtless is the necessity to introduce modern on-line dictionaries and encyclopedias. We often recommend the following. Britannica is a web-based of the most authoritative encyclopedia in the world. It contains more than 75 thousand articles in all branches of knowledge. It is annually updated. The results of the search include not only texts from encyclopedia, but also references to Internet resources and some journal publications. The encyclopedic articles are interconnected by numerous hyperlinks. Now Britannica is a fee-based resource [10]. Microsoft Encarta is the Internet version of famous universal encyclopedia annually issued by Microsoft on CD-ROMs and DVD. It contains more than 41000 of articles, great number of illustrations, audio and video files. The majority of multimedia objects including audio and video are accessible through Internet. Key word search and navigation general-to-specific are possible. The articles’ texts have hyperlinks. The articles are weekly renewed. As additional services the search on the topics in the Internet, news MSNBC or Barnes @ Noble bookshop catalogue are proposed [11]. Special resources for technical students. During the period of approbation and implementation of the Internet tools into the training process there outlined a number of important and effective resources. The advantages of these tools were highly appreciated by the postgraduate students. In order to keep the level of English on track we recommend the following useful links of on line magazines and newspapers: http://www.theguardian.com/uk; http://www.economist.com; http://www.businessweek.com/; http://www.learnerstv.com/ is academic video courses on Management and Economicshttp://freevideolectures. com/ video courses on Management and Economics. For technicians the following recourses could also be recommended: https://tefltastic.wordpress.com/worksheets/technical-english/ [12]; http://eslrightnow.com/english-for-engineering/ [13]; http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS5ME54d_iJ0cOOZun4ikKQhttp://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php? title=technicalengineering-english-test; http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/grammar/index.xmlgrammar for engineers [14]; http://www.cambridge.org/it/elt/catalogue/subject/project/custom/item2489163/Cambridge-English-for-Engineering-Resources/?site_locale=it_IT¤tSubjectID=2561588 case studies for Cambridge English for Engineering. Resources for development of basic linguistic skills. Besides we highly recommend the following resources: http://www.scribd.com/ is for development of reading skills, creation of individual materials and tests for reading in IELTS format and in other formats, giving the opportunity to share the texts and to see the ratings; http://www.ted.com/, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/ are examples of video and audio podcasts with the possibility of text creation; http://azargrammar.com/index.html, http://www. englishpage.com/index.html are grammar and grammar tests; http://voicethread.com/#home, http://englishcentral. com/home?ref=logo, http://vocaroo.com/ are links for development of speaking skills with the emphases on pronunciation and speech fluency; http://www.listen-and-write.com/ are for development of listening and writing skills, https://docs. google.com/#home is the link for creation of Google form tests enabling to conduct collaborative editing and discussing [15]. Conclusion. The analysis of each separate effective technology, used at different stages of teaching postgraduates is a complicated longtime process and can become the subject of a special discussion. In this connection in conclusion one can mention that the implementation of Internet technologies into the teaching process of postgraduate students positively effects cognitive-informative, professionally-oriented and didactic potential. It creates positive emotional educational environment, developing autonomy, ability of critical thinking and independent decision making. Having described integrated methods of teaching postgraduates of technical university of aerospace profile English for scientific purposes on a complex based methodology we must conclude that curriculum content is aimed at postgraduates’ comprehensive training in the field of professional communication in the international educational and scientific environment. Positive experience of integration of Internet resources, e-learning and other innovative forms of work in the process of training is accumulated. Effective methods of training are worked out.×
About the authors
N. A Shumakova
Reshetnev Siberian State Aerospace University
Email: shumna@inbox.ru
31, Krasnoyarsky Rabochy Av., Krasnoyarsk, 660037, Russian Federation
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