ADAPTATION OF SCIENTIFIC TEXTS AS AN EFFECTIVE MEANS OF DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS

Abstract

The article notes that the process of forming professional speech remains at the center of scholarly attention, as its effectiveness determines a specialist’s career advancement. The author emphasizes that the foundation of a professional, scientific discourse lies primarily in academic texts as a genre-specific type of scientific exposition. Their linguistic standard is shaped by such features as accuracy, logical consistency, coherence, informativeness, compositional clarity, emotional and subjective-evaluative neutrality, unambiguity, explicitness, paraphrasticity, dialogicity, and others. The author’s research focuses on the latter two features, which define the aim of the scholarly study – to characterize the paraphrasticity and dialogicity of scientific texts as an effective means of adapting them for the development of professional communication skills among higher education students. The difficulty in perceiving, understanding, interpreting, and reproducing academic texts, according to the author, is linked to such stylistic dominants as a high level of abstraction, the concentration of terminological vocabulary – often with ambiguous interpretations – and the complexity of the author’s expression. This defines the task of the language instructor: to adapt the content and structure of such texts according to the needs of higher education students, taking into account their linguistic and professional readiness. The author proposes optimizing this process by interpreting complex concepts through their lexico-semantic translation, commentary based on word-formation motivation, and etymological or historical-chronological references. The activation of students’ cognitive activity, the author argues, is facilitated through verbal-figurative visualizations that present the studied material in an associative form, enhancing its pragmatic orientation toward the learner as a consumer of scientific information. The accessibility of academic texts is also enhanced by methods of dialogization, among which the author highlights questions that draw attention to key components determining the scientific narrative’s direction, references to authoritative scholars’ opinions, and repetitions of speech segments that clarify the essence of the message and define its communicative intent. These methods contribute to the development of students’ text-forming competence and stimulate their cognitive interests.