The role of annotating and abstracting in the formation of language competencies



This article deals with some methodological and practical issues of teaching referencing and annotating professional literature in a foreign language for non-linguistic students. The study of these issues is due to the importance of developing skills to work with professional texts in order to write their brief content in the form of abstracts and annotations.

Keywords: foreign language, abstract, annotation.

The rapid growth of science and technology in our time, the wide development of international relations require a constant exchange of information about the literature in all branches of knowledge. In this regard, the modern concept of teaching a foreign language for non-linguistic students places special emphasis on the role of a foreign language as an integral component of professional education training of a modern specialist of any profile. An important goal in teaching a foreign language for non-linguistic students is to prepare a specialist to master reading as a way to obtain quickly and structure professionally the relevant information.

The ability to work with literature is one of the basic skills underlying any professional activity, since reading is the main source of information. Therefore, it has a special place in teaching foreign languages. Successful acquisition of reading involves the formation of a number of skills. [1, p. 7] The natural and necessary completion of the course of training in reading scientific and technical literature is training in the creation of «secondary» texts (Blumenau D. I., Leonov V. P., etc.), i.e. abstracts / annotations.

The relevance of this topic is due to the needs of future professionals in mastering the skills of abstract translation, which is one of the most important types of work in the process of learning foreign language of students of non-linguistic faculties and leads to a significant increase in the level of knowledge.

The value of abstracting and annotating as a method of forming skills and developing skills of foreign language reading and writing has been studied in the works of A. A. Veise, N. D. Zorina, B. A. Cheremisov, I. L. BIM, G. V. Rogovoy, and others. The authors of scientific works offer different approaches to the interpretation of the concept of abstracting. However, despite the variety of scientific research devoted to the issues of annotating and abstracting professionally-oriented texts, the problem of teaching these skills is developed very well and the task of forming the ability to use literature in the specialty often remains unsolved. In practice, it turns out students have a weak command of translating and even more abstracting of a scientific text, because they do not know its features and ignore the language difficulties that arise in this process. Therefore it is necessary to train in abstract translation and annotation, which contains relatively detailed information about the characteristics of the primary (original) text, such as its purpose, subject matter, and research methods [2, p.1 2]. The range of use of abstracts and annotations, the main purpose of which is the rapid dissemination of scientific and technical information, is extremely wide. Knowledge of the basics of abstract translation and annotation allows you to navigate quickly the literature of your specialty and not spend extra time on the laborious process of literal translation.

Despite the variety of functions inherent in the abstract and annotation (reference, communicative, informative, educational, etc.) in the practice of teaching foreign languages, these types of texts also have an educational function.

In professional education today, it is important to expand the tasks and content of foreign language communication through the interdisciplinary connection of a foreign language to the study of other disciplines. Interdisciplinary connections contribute to the integration of knowledge. The work on teaching abstracting and annotating scientific texts in the specialty in our practice was carried out with senior students of IT, Economics and Law. The training cycle for these students consisted of the following stages:

1) motivation-oriented

2) goal-setting

3) developing and forming

4) generalizing.

At the first stage, the motivational basis for teaching a foreign language is updated. The theoretical review of the thematic blocks «Abstracting» and» Annotation " includes a presentation of the following aspects of the subject of study: the main stages, basic concepts and specifics of abstracting and annotating foreign sources; methods of presenting information in the abstract and annotation; General characteristics of abstracts and annotations; features of the language and style of the abstract and annotation [3, p. 21].

During the second stage, the goals and objectives of teaching foreign language literature abstracting and annotation in the system of comprehensive training of a specialist are established, and the text material for group and independent abstracting and annotation is determined. These materials can be used for the organization of the educational process, both in classroom and when performing semester tasks as part of independent work of students. The use of organized independent work in the form of abstracting and annotating texts in a foreign language is considered as one of the forms of monitoring the achievement of the planned result obtained during the course of the training module, the study of which forms knowledge and activities, disciplines defined by the work program.

At the third stage, the development of professional vocabulary is carried out, the practical skills of applying the knowledge obtained during the study of a foreign language in situations of everyday professional communication are laid, activated and consolidated.

The fourth stage is the systematization of the knowledge obtained and the final quality control of their practical application. Thus, this scientific and methodological concept is based on the principle of «simple to complex», i.e. the way of gradual and systematic mastering of skills of abstracting and annotation of information: from simple texts to complex texts, from group classroom work to independent work is proposed.

The method of teaching abstracting and annotating reading is based on compression/compression of the text at the semantic and structural/stylistic levels. It is based on the ability to use reference schemes that are distinguished based on the characteristics of the text; appropriate reading strategies; methods of abstract presentation.

The work on creating secondary texts can be divided into three stages, each of them forms certain skills: preparatory, the purpose of which is to determine the informative content of the text; analytical operations, the purpose of which is to compress the text at the semantic and structural levels; synthetic operations, the purpose of which is to form extracted and compressed information into a secondary text.

The first stage involves a general analysis of the original text and determining its informative value. The reader is given two tasks: to determine the thematic focus of the text and to understand the text as a whole. At this stage, the following skills should be formed: to determine the features of the material being studied, i.e. to identify the forms of expression of thoughts in the text: description, narration, reasoning; to divide the text into logically complete parts, i.e. to navigate the text, find the introduction / beginning, main part, conclusion / ending; correlate text material with drawings, diagrams, graphs, diagrams, and other graphical tools included in the text; predict the content of the text based on different types of titles, guess the meaning of the word from the context, and highlight semantic milestones in the text that help determine the main topic of publication.

The above skills are developed in the process of viewing and familiarization reading. Reference points/diagrams are the title of the article, the thematic focus of the vocabulary, illustrative material in the form of diagrams, tables, maps, photos, terms, bibliographic material, etc.

As you know, only the new / main information contained in the article is needed to compose the abstract, so the process of processing the text in this case is associated with a conscious assessment of the information: necessary / unnecessary; main / secondary; reliable / unreliable, etc. Such an assessment occurs during the introductory reading.

The ability to predict the content of the text, put forward hypotheses, and find confirmation of the proposed forecast is also developed in the process of introductory or viewing reading.

The ability to evaluate correctly the information obtained during viewing or search reading is one of the main ones, since the evaluation of the original source information in terms of its significance is at the heart of referencing as a communication process. It is quite difficult to give an objective assessment of the information in educational abstracting. This is due to the fact that the author of the abstract is a specific person with his or her own life experience, with a certain degree of competence in the issues covered in certain publications. But in any technical text, if it is considered as the main unit of communication, you can distinguish: new ideas, hypotheses, experimental data, new techniques, etc. Such information is completely included in the abstract; actual data. If they are not new, only digital data is taken from them; argumentative and illustrative material. As a rule, this type of information is given in a generalized form. The formation of any skills and abilities is possible only under the condition of systematic work, which is based on a specially developed system of exercises.

In the process of teaching abstracting and annotating, it is important to teach students to understand the requirements for the preparation of an abstract and annotation related to the various purposes of these documents. The annotation only serves to inform you about the existence of a document of a certain content and nature, while the abstract describes the content of the document with a description of research methods, with actual data and the results of the work. The main task of annotation is to summarize the content of the document, while abstracting involves the skill of shortening the text of the primary document.

Teaching annotating and abstracting professional text materials as a form of instructional activities that create opportunities combining technical and liberal education, promotes personal growth of students, introduces the realities of the country of the target language and may be considered as one of the means of optimization of the process of learning a foreign language.

References:

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2. Вейзе А. А. Чтение, реферирование и аннотирование иностранного текста.-М.,1985.
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