Context-Based Integrative Educational Technique in Profession-Oriented Foreign Language Teaching (Academic Model United Nations)

Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics. 2019. No. 10. P. 50–63.

Chashko M.

The aim of the article is to examine the Academic Model United Nations (Model UN) as a context-based integrative educational technique in profession-oriented foreign language teaching (FLT); to point out the context-based integrative nature of profession-oriented language learning and highlight the importance of using product-based educational techniques in FLT for developing students’ future personal and professional autonomy; to identify the ways of integrating Model UN as a format of social mode of teaching. The article provides an overview of an experiment of implementing the Model UN format in the educational process, conducted in 2017 in the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE), which proved that Model UN successfully serves as an “educational laboratory” that engages students in cognitive, research, creative and productive activities while using foreign language as a tool of solving problem-based tasks. The work includes the stages of integrating Model UN format in the educational process; analyzes a number of difficulties that may occur and suggests several ways of dealing with them; involves recommendations for preparing students for the roles of Model UN delegates and the criteria of participants’ written and spoken speech assessment. The results of the research show that Model UN, as a highly flexible interdisciplinary educational technique, can be employed in various formats on different educational levels as a tool of modelling the context of students’ future professional activities contributing to the development of their professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC), as well as their future personal and professional autonomy.

Keywords: ELT, Model United Nations, context-based learning, integrative educational technique, profession-oriented, FLT