Implementation of play-based learning activity as a tool to develop students’ professional communicative competence within university course “English for specific purposes”

Abstract

One of the most effective ways to develop students’ ability to find, extract and process information from the great variety of authentic sources is the implementation of some interactive forms and methods into the studying process and its theoretical and practical enrichment. In this research the play-based learning activity is understood as the combination of the following three components: playing (stimulating emotional emancipation and exalting the participants, fulfilling their ambitions, expressing their opinions creatively and inspiring interaction between them); educational (aiming to enrich students’ knowledge, abilities, skills and experience) and professional (providing the opportunity for teachers to simulate a variety of professional situations). Professional communicative competence is considered to be the combination of knowledge, skills and experience that students of different specialties require to have in order to carry out their professional activities. In order to check the efficiency of the playbased learning activity in the development of students’ professional communicative competence we have conducted the experiment, which was held in Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University (on the basis of Roman and Germanic Philology Department). The study involved 64 second year students of the Foreign Language Department who were divided into two groups: experimental group (32 students) and control group (32 students). 32 students of the experimental group were involved into the experiment with implementing the play-based learning activity in the curriculum and the students of the control group continued studying in their usual way. The research results have shown the effectiveness of play-based learning activity implementation within the university course “English for Specific Purposes” to develop the students’ professional communicative competence.