| Abstract [eng] |
A high quality contemporary university requires the competence that enables a student to understand lectures on the subject in a foreign language, to participate in academic discussions in the European Higher Education area, to study in various joint programmes at Lithuanian and foreign universities, to participate in student mobility exchange programmes and international projects, to feel confidence and self-esteem in any academic and professional foreign language discourse. The development of academic English communicative competence of the students with different linguistic competence level and no previous experience of academic language learning in a secondary school and integration of academic context (in addition to professional context) into the language subject programmes has become a core need in higher education. Oral communication fulfils a number of general and discipline-specific, pedagogical-educational and academic functions. Speaking in academic contexts is becoming increasingly important due to transition to innovative methods of teaching. Speaking in a foreign language is twice a big challenge for a university student. Every student can have different needs, depending on the chosen discipline, language skills, cognitive level, cultural background, and many other factors. This indicates the problems related to foreign language teaching at university level and presupposes the need to transition of teaching a foreign language for academic purposes, and, thus, innovating a foreign language subject syllabus. The purpose of the empirical research was to find out about students’ oral communication skills necessary for successful functioning in the academic context. This particular article is aimed at revealing and describing teachers’ evaluation of students’ oral academic English skills in comparison with their importance as is viewed by the teachers. Thus, the objectives of this article are (1) to describe how teachers’ assess students’ oral academic English communication skills, (2) to describe how teachers see the importance of oral academic communication skills, (3) to analyse and compare the results regarding the differences of teacher student assessment of oral academic English communication skills and their importance, and on the basis of the analysis of the results obtained to develop the recommendations for the English language course curriculum innovations. |
