The Role of a Foreign Language in the Formation of Professionally Oriented Communication in Students of Non-Linguistic Specialties

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine changes in students’ communicative readiness following the introduction of a series of training sessions tailored to a specific professional context. The study was conducted at the Department of Foreign Languages, Mykolaiv National Agrarian University, between October and December 2024 and involved 120 students from agronomy and economics programs in the third and fourth years. The research design combined a pedagogical experiment with quantitative and qualitative analysis. The program included business and intercultural communication training sessions aimed at the practical application of language skills. The results indicate a statistically significant increase in all three key indicators in the experimental group: lexical accuracy increased from 2.8 to 3.6, structural correctness increased from 3.1 to 3.9, and communicative adequacy increased from 2.6 to 3.8 on a 5-point scale. Spearman rank correlation analysis revealed significant positive relationships between professionally oriented English-language communicative competence and students’ readiness for professional communication. In particular, the highest correlation reported in the correlation analysis (r = 0.72) was found between professional vocabulary and participation in discussions. The findings also suggest that the training format may have supported students’ motivation and confidence in professional communication. Overall, the results indicate that structured ESP (English for Specific Purposes) training was associated with improvements in professionally oriented English-language communicative competence and professional communication readiness within the studied sample.