Formation of Professional English-Language Communication Skills in Technical Higher Education: A Task-Based Methodological System

The article presents a task-based methodological system for developing the professional English communicative competence of students in technical higher education institutions. The system combines the principles of task-based language teaching and English for Specific Purposes and shifts the focus of instruction from working on language forms to performing authentic communicative actions in professionally modelled situations. Professional English communicative competence is operationalised through five interrelated components: linguistic accuracy, professional vocabulary, fluency, interactional competence, and professional appropriateness. On this basis, an original model – the Technical Professional Communication Task Cycle – is proposed, comprising nine sequential stages, from presenting a professional situation and preparing to perform an authentic technical task through professional interaction, decision-making, feedback, reflection, self-assessment and language consolidation. Ten types of authentic communicative tasks corresponding to typical kinds of engineering activity are systematised: technical problem-solving, information exchange, decision-making, troubleshooting, technical presentations, professional meetings, client interaction, negotiation, project management and collaborative decision-making. A five-component assessment rubric is developed, linking the performance of professional communicative tasks to specific competence indicators and providing a basis for assessing observable communicative performance. The proposed system integrates professional context, authentic communicative tasks, technical content, professional interaction, decision-making and outcome-based assessment into a single methodological framework. The empirical effectiveness of the proposed system was not tested within this study and remains a subject for future research.