Integrated approach to teaching ESP based on MOOCs

Globalization of the labor market opened new international opportunities for graduates of technical schools and provoked significant changes in requirements to qualification of a modern engineer. To be successful, students of engineering programmes should not only acquire professional knowledge, but also develop good communication skills. Engineering education in countries where the native language is not English ? such as Russia ? is influenced not only by a new vision of a professional engineer, but also by the need to develop foreign language skills to enable competitiveness of their graduates in modern society. The importance of learning foreign languages and ability to apply them in technical communication has increased dramatically. Taking into account the recent processes of intensification and integration in engineering education and a new role of communication skills in the profile of a modern engineer, the existing approaches to teaching foreign languages should be modernized. Although urgent attempts to find new solutions are observed in Russian institutions of higher engineering education, the current language courses are not integrated into engineering curricular to the extent that could enable global competitiveness and successful international careers for their graduates. Inthisarticletheauthorsproposeawaytoorganizeanessentiallynewapproachtoteachingforeignlang uages based on Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs are considered as a didactic tool where engineering content is provided in a foreign language, which offers a unique opportunity for non-English speaking engineering schools to build a naturally integrated course of a foreign language for specific purposes. In January 2014, Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia initiated an experiment aimed at testing the didactic potential of MOOCs in ESP courses. The project attracted great interest of the University students and proved efficiency of using MOOCs as a new education tool for teaching English for Specific Purposes to engineering students.