AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Ecology and Environmental Sciences and Faculty of
Environmental and Manufacturing Technology. All these
faculties have their specifically oriented study programmes in
which students can obtain quality education in chosen areas.
Despite highly technical orientation of studies, students of
technical universities understand well the necessity of mastering
foreign languages at high level. It is partly due to their studies
duties (they need to study a lot of literature, including foreign
authors’ works, and to use this information e.g. when writing
bachelor, master and doctoral theses) and partly due to the
requirements of the labour market. Therefore, apart from
technical and professional disciplines, the students of technical
universities in Slovakia study professional foreign languages,
too. Teaching of professional foreign languages at the Technical
University in Zvolen is provided by the Institute of Foreign
Languages. The students study professional languages closely
related to their study specialisations at the specialised seminars.
Three languages are proposed to the students: English, German
and French. The students can study also Chinese language.
However, proposed courses of Chinese are oriented towards the
acquisition of only general Chinese, not technical. From the
proposed foreign languages, the majority of the students of the
Technical University in Zvolen choose English. This language
(as the first foreign language for the majority of the Technical
University in Zvolen students) is included into the University
curricula, however, the number of lessons per week depends on
the Faculties. Second foreign languages are poorly presented.
3 Needs
Teaching foreign languages including professional aspects
(professional vocabulary, phrases, grammatical and syntactical
structures etc.) is based on the work with professional
(specialised) texts in foreign languages. According to Grabe
(1991, p. 375), reading is probably the most important skill for
foreign language learners in academic contexts because they
must acquire a lot of knowledge which they are supposed to take
advantage of and use in their career. Reading is the ability to
understand the text, to get meaning from the written, as well as
unwritten (reading between the lines), to acquire important
information from the text and to benefit in some way from it. As
one of four basic language skills, learners of foreign languages
deal with it from the beginning of the process of studying
foreign language and they develop it gradually all over their life
(Veverková, 2018). Reading is also a base for the development
of other language skills, e.g. Krashen (2004, p. 17) proposes that
more reading brings about better reading comprehension, writing
style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development.
Reading comprehension is an active and complex process,
during which a reader tries to understand a written text. If the
readers want to be successful in reading and to read efficiently,
they must master the language at needed level, as well as
different skills and strategies necessary for the process
(Veverková, 2018). Grabe (1991, pp. 378-379) mentions the
following strategies as the ones used by the efficient readers:
adjusting the reading speed; skimming ahead; considering titles,
headings, pictures and text structure information; anticipating
information to come, etc.
Hosenfeld (1977) declares that the efficient reader focuses on the
meaning of the text as a whole, anticipates the content and does
not pay attention to minor information.
Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998, pp. 96-98) consider the
following skills as important and needed to be mastered:
selecting what is relevant for the current purpose;
using all the features of the text such as headings, layout,
typeface;
skimming for content and meaning;
scanning for specifics;
identifying organisational patterns;
understanding relations within a sentence and between
sentences;
using cohesive and discourse markers;
predicting, inferring and guessing;
identifying main ideas, supporting ideas and examples;
processing and evaluating the information during reading;
transferring or using the information while or after reading.
We consider reading a key skill for the learners of professional
foreign languages at technical universities in Slovakia. In order
to develop the reading competency of the students of the
Technical University in Zvolen we have been carrying out the
project “Developing the Reading Competency and Teaching
Technical Foreign Languages at Technical Universities” since
2017. The project is being carried out in cooperation of two
universities, Technical University in Zvolen and Faculty of Arts,
Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, both in central
Slovakia. It is financed by the Cultural and Educational Grant
Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and
Sport of the Slovak Republic. This project and its outputs are
focused on improving the quality of teaching foreign languages
and facilitating the reading competency of students. Its main
outputs are going to be published by the end of the year 2019
and will be in the form of electronic course books for six
university study programmes with the technological focus,
which are taught in Slovakia, as well as in the Czech Republic:
Forestry (English and German language), Timber Frame
Structures (English language), Fire Protection and Safety
(English language), Furniture and Interior Design (English
language), Ecology and Environmental Studies (English
language) and Mechanical Engineering (English language).
Moreover, bilingual glossaries (English – Slovak and German –
Slovak) of professional word stock and further supporting
electronic materials aimed at developing the reading competency
of students will be an important part of the outputs.
During the implementation of the project two scientific
conferences have been held at the Technical University in
Zvolen. The conferences proposed a place for the exchange of
experience and practical observations of the university teachers
of foreign languages from the Slovak, as well as Czech
Republics. A lot of valuable discussions were involved during
which new cooperation between various university workplaces
emerged. Another conference is planned to be organised in
October 2019.
A series of workshops was held at the Technical University in
Zvolen, too, in order to increase proficiency of the project
members in the sphere of developing the reading competency of
the technical universities students. However, we had an
opportunity to attend a very interesting workshop on the use of
the statistics as the mathematics discipline in pedagogical and
linguistic research.
The members of the project team have published 17 research
papers and studies so far, related to the project topic in different
journals in Slovakia and abroad. Two proceedings of scientific
papers were published, too, and two monographs dealing with
the topic of reading comprehension are being prepared for the
publication.
We confirmed the importance of developing the reading
competency of the students of technical universities in Slovakia
also with the analysis of the doctoral students’ attitude to reading
professional texts in foreign languages. According to the short
analysis that we carried out at the Technical University in
Zvolen we can sum up that the doctoral students from our
sample read professional texts in foreign languages,
predominantly in English. Moreover, when studying, preparing
for the exams or writing doctoral thesis, 70 % of doctoral
students from our research sample prefer and use professional
texts in foreign languages to the texts in Slovak language. Nearly
60 % of the questionnaire respondents spend more than 3 hours a
week reading these texts. It was also found out that doctoral
students are aware of the necessity of mastering foreign
languages, because they are a tool to obtain new and useful
information in the sphere of science and research. Professional
literature written in foreign languages provides them with an
important source of knowledge. More than half of them admit
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