Concreteness and complexity as necessary requirements to determine goals of teaching foreign languagein non-linguistic university

Abstract

The paper discusses the problems of the higher education system, and particularly the quality of the foreign language specialists training in Kazakhstan. The authors note that the ongoing changes in all spheres of society's life affect the current trends in the development of higher professional education, among which the leading principles in the sphere of foreign-language education can be named the continuity, interactivity and humanization. The realization of them is not researched properly. One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of specificity in setting goals and objectives for foreign language teaching at a university, which entails uneven disclosure of goals through the content of training. As a result, there is a discrepancy between the goals of foreign language teaching at a university to the general goals of higher professional education, as a consequence it might appear incomplete correlation of the content of instruction at the subject and general educational levels. In their study, the authors substantiate the need for a complete and specific presentation of the objectives of foreign language teaching in higher school programs for non-linguistic specialties and present the results of the analysis of typical foreign language programs in non-linguistic specialties. They also offer the author's vision of setting goals for teaching a foreign language, taking into account the principles of completeness and concreteness.