Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use

of Integrated Teaching

Svitlana V. Bodnar

1 a

, Viktor V. Koval

2 b

, Nataliia V. Stuchynska

3 c

, Tetiana M. Lesina

4 d

Larysa V. Filippova

3 e

and Antonina V. Kichuk

4 f

Odesa Institute of Trade and Economics of Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics, 6 Inglezi Str., Odesa, 65070,

Ukraine

National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 54 Volodymyrska Str., Kyiv, 01030, Ukraine

Bogomolets National Medical University, 13 Shevchenko Blvd., Kyiv, 01601, Ukraine

Izmail State University of Humanities, 12 Repina Street Str., Izmail, 68601, Ukraine

Keywords:

Integrated Teaching, Non-Linguistic Schools, Knowledge, Foreign Language Proﬁciency.

Abstract:

The article highlights the problem of introducing integrated teaching the students majoring in economics

in the educational process of Ukrainian tertiary non-linguistic schools. It presents the peculiarities of the

immersion into a foreign language environment arising from the acquisition of the professional knowledge

in a foreign language. Some strategies for integrated teaching are suggested: 1) systematic repetition of the

linguistic and professional material; 2) use of each language unit, which is under study, in its maximum

possible linguistic and professional environments and in the connection with the previously learned material;

3) implementation of a major subject (Microeconomics) and a foreign language (English) integration in the

educational process of Ukrainian tertiary schools. The programme duration was 4 months. A total of 90

students majoring in economics participated in the programme of integrated teaching. After the completion

of the programme the students’ professional knowledge and foreign language proﬁciency were assessed and

their feedback collected and analyzed. Data were obtained from pre-and-post assessment tests of language and

professional proﬁciency. Results indicated the effectiveness of the suggested educational strategies, the use of

which provided a possibility of the transition from training period to a real professional communication.

1 INTRODUCTION

The current stage of the society development is char-

acterized by a rapid ﬂow of information in many pre-

viously existing areas of knowledge, as well as in

the “newly-born” scientiﬁc ﬁelds. Providing students

with knowledge of new discoveries in these ﬁelds of

science, technology and production, without violating

young people’s interests in studying the fundamen-

tal laws of nature, society and humanity development,

which were included in the curricula of the past, can’t

be implemented because of the impossibility of aca-

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9890-327X

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2562-4373

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5583-899X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7923-2247

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7836-4355

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2657-661X

demic hours increase at universities.

Therefore, the way to resolve the contradiction be-

tween the constantly-increasing ﬂows of information

and the lack of time for its mastering, the scholars see

in the process of merging adjacent areas of knowl-

edge into one subject integrity. It will allow students

achieving the highest level of skills development in

two activities: a professional activity and a foreign

language speech activity. Moreover, this idea is be-

ing deepened and updated nowadays due to the grow-

ing need in highly-qualiﬁed specialists who should be

able to implement their professional skills in a foreign

language.

The choice of this direction of study is based on

the Conceptual Principles of State Policy for the En-

glish language development in Ukrainian higher ed-

ucation establishments from 13.07.2019 which em-

phasize the importance of English for enhancing

people’s educational and professional opportunities

516

Bodnar, S., Koval, V., Stuchynska, N., Lesina, T., Filippova, L. and Kichuk, A.

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching.

DOI: 10.5220/0010933500003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 2, pages 516-527

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

(mon.gov.ua, 2019). In our opinion, such an organi-

zation of professional training in English should con-

tain an invariant component in order to take into ac-

count the following: the content of the professional

discipline; the level of professional knowledge of this

discipline and the proﬁciency in English as a means

of teaching it; deﬁnite methodological actions of inte-

grated teaching two disciplines; the previous foreign-

language linguistic experience of learners.

There are many research works examining the

speciﬁcs of integrated teaching implementation at ed-

ucation systems in different countries: Poland (Czura

et al., 2009; Leshchenko et al., 2018; Papaja, 2013),

Germany (Dallinger et al., 2018; Hallet, 2015), Den-

mark (van Kampen et al., 2020); Spain (Ardeo,

2019; Marsh, 2013; Merino and Lasagabaster, 2018);

Latin America (McDougald, 2016); North Amer-

ica (Maguire-Fong and Mangione, 2016); India

(Doraisamy and Radhakrishnan, 2013); Kazakhstan

(Dontsov and Burdina, 2018); China (Xiao, 2016).

But despite the fact that all education systems have

their own speciﬁc features of integrated teaching im-

plementation, all scholars stress that such integrated

technique works successfully in every educational en-

vironment.

It should be stressed that nowadays in the world

there are more and more English undergraduate pro-

grammes for the students who would like to increase

their competency in a foreign language and a major

subject offered by European Universities. These pro-

grammes turned out to be not only popular but be-

came a strategic means of education internationaliz-

ing.

The research “English-language Bachelor’s pro-

grammes: internationalization of European higher ed-

ucation” conducted by the European Association for

International Education (EAIE) and the Study Portals

(Sandstrom, 2018) in 2017 showed that 33% out of

2317 respondents indicated education in a foreign lan-

guage as a priority area of internationalization of Uni-

versity educational programmes. However, the num-

ber of English-language undergraduate programmes

varies greatly across countries. EAIE has studied

19 European countries and analyzed: the number

of English-taught bachelor’s programmes (ETB); the

number and percentage of higher educational insti-

tutions (HEIs) offering ETBs in each country to see

if the programmes were limited to a few institutions

or were more widespread; share of HEIs offering

ETBs. According to the obtained data, the leading

countries which have English-language undergradu-

ate programmes are the following: Turkey (545 pro-

grammes), the Netherlands (317), Denmark (159),

Switzerland (134), Poland (131), France (95). The

smallest number of English-language undergraduate

programmes is in Romania (32).

Among the most common areas where the edu-

cation is taught in English are the following: busi-

ness, management, social sciences and engineering.

If to compare the quantity of the countries which offer

professional programmes in English, then the lead-

ers are the following countries: the Netherlands (42),

France (41), Poland (40), Switzerland (35), Turkey

(32), Denmark (23). The smallest number of uni-

versities is again in Romania (8). A different picture

emerges when we assess the relative share of universi-

ties offering English-language education. In Switzer-

land almost all universities offer programmes in En-

glish, so this country can be called the place with a

maximum degree of penetration of English-language

education. Then Turkey has 94%, the Netherlands

and Denmark follow having 75% and 70% of such

universities respectively. The lowest percentage of

universities offering professional education in English

is in Poland (14%), France (13%), Romania (9%).

Thus, from ﬁgure 1 it is seen that in spite of dif-

ferent number of universities offering ETB and the

English-taught bachelor’s programmes in the above-

mentioned countries, integrated teaching is rather

popular in European higher education institutions.

And the students willingly enrol into them preferring

to study not only in the economically stabilized coun-

tries such as: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark

but also in the countries with low income, for ex-

ample, Romania or in the economically unstabilized

countries, for example, Turkey, only to have a chance

to master their profession in a foreign language and

to have more chances to integrate into the world com-

munity.

Concerning such well-developed European coun-

try as Germany, the ﬁrst programmes of integrated

teaching in English appeared in 1990s through the

dominance of the English language in international

communication. Germany has adopted the sub-

ject centred curriculum approach with emphasis on

learner-centred tasks in instruction. In the subject-

centred curriculum, courses are divided as sepa-

rate subjects or disciplines but interdisciplinary ap-

proaches are also enabled. Nowadays integrated

teaching in English is being implemented in many

secondary schools in Germany, and a growing num-

ber of studies seem to conﬁrm it as a valuable addition

to more traditional programmes of language teaching.

The course is intended as an introduction to this

ﬁeld of teaching certain school subjects (providing

examples from a range of subjects, e.g. geography,

history, politics and biology) through the medium of

English. It is estimated that 20000 secondary school

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching

517

Figure 1: Integrated teaching penetration into European higher education.

students study content subjects in a foreign language.

But such great introduction of integrated teaching can

be found only in secondary schools (Grenfell, 2002).

Speaking about universities, we can say that there

are currently only a limited number of undergraduate

English-language programs at top universities in Ger-

many. Due to the scarce nature of these programs, if

a student really wants to study at a leading university,

he may have to be a little bit ﬂexible on his choice of

program.

According to the data of QS World Univer-

sity Ranking 2020 (www.topuniversities.com, 2021),

there are only 9 leading universities in Germany

which offer a bachelor-level degree program taught

in English allowing international students to study for

a Bachelor of Arts (BA) or a Bachelor of Science

(BSc), depending on their major, among them there

are such universities as: Universit

at Freiburg, Frank-

furt School of Finance and Management, Karlsruhe

Institute of Technology, Georg-August-Universit

ottingen which have a strong international reputa-

tion.

So, we can indicate that the decisions in educa-

tional policy always have their own effect in differ-

ent countries. That’s why the content and language

integration is applied in different countries in differ-

ent ways. There is no model for export. Despite a

great popularity of integrated teaching in the world,

Ukrainian Universities don’t participate in the inter-

national competition offering ETBs to students and

still have curricula where major subjects and a for-

eign language are taught according to different syl-

labi, not having interdisciplinary connections. Re-

gretfully, there is a small number of tertiary schools in

Ukraine, which not only suggest integrated learning

but also implement it into practice. To our mind, such

situation occurs in tertiary schools in Ukraine due to

the following points: lack of teachers who are literate

in three domains: a major subject, a foreign language

and a teaching integrated strategy that conﬁrms the

idea of He and Lin (He and Lin, 2018) stating that

for content and language integrated teaching a special

kind of teacher with integrated content knowledge and

knowledge about language should work (He and Lin,

2018); absence of subject textbooks in a foreign lan-

guage adapted for non-native speakers and pedagogi-

cal guidelines how to teach parallel non-linguistic and

linguistic disciplines; students’ insufﬁciency of the

prior linguistic experience. Smit and Dafouz (Smit

and Dafouz, 2012) state that process of integrated

learning / teaching will become better in the future,

as a new generation of students and teachers master-

ing in foreign languages appears in higher education.

The tendency of different subjects integration into

one unity has already been under consideration of

Ukrainian scholars. There are research works exam-

ining the content and language integrated teaching for

future: ecologists (Kordonova, 2014), psychologists

(Petrova et al., 2020), engineers (Popel, 2015), tech-

nical students (Mart

ın del Pozo, 2015), economists

(Kostetska et al., 2020; Luchaninova et al., 2019),

medical students (Bhardwaj et al., 2015), mathemati-

cians (Mart

ınez and Dominguez, 2018; Lazorenko,

2016), physicians (Merzlykin et al., 2018), seafar-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

518

ers (Litvinenko, 2015; Primina, 2017) etc. How-

ever, in all these works the accent was done mainly

on some English teaching points: how to make pre-

sentations of technical equipment; how to make oral

professionally-oriented speech; how to read drug pre-

scriptions or sailing directions. It did not solve the ex-

isting contradiction between the needs of the Univer-

sity graduates to use English to acquire new knowl-

edge in the professional sphere and communicate in

ﬂuent English beyond the environment of integrated

learning and their real language proﬁciency.

We consider that the achievement of such task will

be mostly facilitated by the procedural integration of

professional and foreign language activities. Accord-

ing to Tarnopolsky (Tarnopolsky, 2018), integration is

a process that ensures parallel acquisition of knowl-

edge from certain non-linguistic disciplines together

with the acquisition of the target language and the

skills of communicating in it. Integrated teaching is

deﬁned by Snow et al. (Snow et al., 1989) as training

in which the emphasis shifts from isolated language

teaching for professional communication, to associ-

ation, integration, language acquision with the study

of special disciplines (Spanos, 1989). As for procedu-

ral integration, we, following the ideas of Martynova

(Martynova, 2016) and Nenkov et al. (Nenkov et al.,

2017), regard it as the synthesis of teaching processes

of different subjects, the contents of which are not

merged into a single unity, but must be learned dur-

ing one educational process at the same period of time

and with the pedagogical efforts of the same teachers.

Its dual-focused character is considered to be a chal-

lenge both for teachers and students as it represents a

combination of learning a major subject context and a

foreign language.

However, you should keep in mind that one of the

subjects under study should not have its own seman-

tic content in order not to conﬂict with the subject that

carries the main semantic load. It needs mentioning

that any professional subject and a foreign language

can form a methodical symbiosis. And as a result

of this symbiosis, a natural foreign language environ-

ment arises. The major subject is taught in a foreign

language.

All elements of the teaching process, namely: the

introduction of a new material, the interpretation of

new concepts, the perception of the lecture topic and

its note-taking, the key points understanding, imple-

mentation of practical actions based on the perceived

and comprehended lecture information, revision of

the lecture content, performance of creative tasks on

the basis of the acquired knowledge are carried out in

a foreign language.

Thus, in the procedural integration, a foreign lan-

guage environment is created not for performing indi-

vidual educational activities, but for acquiring educa-

tional and professional knowledge and developing on

its basis the corresponding skills by means of a for-

eign language. Therefore, we consider it advisable to

analyse this aspect in detail.

The aim is to deﬁne and characterise the strate-

gies of integrated teaching a major subject and a for-

eign language to students majoring in economics at

Ukrainian tertiary non-linguistic schools. The tasks

are:

1) to study the existing ways of integrated teach-

ing and determine their advantages and disadvan-

tages;

2) to offer the methodological strategies for inte-

grated teaching a major subject and a foreign lan-

guage to students majoring in economics;

3) to determine the integrated teaching stages;

4) to evaluate the effect of integrated teaching a ma-

jor subject and a foreign language on the educa-

tion outcome achieved by students.

2 METHODS

The research involved the following scientiﬁc meth-

ods: the comparison and system analysis of psy-

chological, pedagogical, methodological sources, ed-

ucation process monitoring, pilot integrated train-

ing students majoring in economics at Ukrainian ter-

tiary non-linguistic schools, work with the author‘s

course for economists “Global economic problems

of today and ways to solve them” (Baklanova et al.,

2020), describing the experimental stages, processing

the experimental data obtained, students’ questioning.

Thus, the relevance of the study is based on the needs

to train future economists, capable to communicate

ﬂuently in English on the professional topics.

2.1 Participants

Following the author‘s integrated course for

economists “Global economic problems of to-

day and ways to solve them”, the students have got an

opportunity to create a stable basic professional vo-

cabulary to be able to use each language unit, which

is under study, in its maximum possible linguistic and

thematic environments; to develop foreign language

communicative and professional skills.

In order to prove the efﬁciency of the offered in-

tegrated course we chose 2-nd-year students major-

ing in ﬁnance who studied at Odesa Trade and Eco-

nomics institute of Kyiv National University of Trade

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching

519

and Economics and Odesa National Economic Uni-

versity. Before the experimental teaching the students

were given the language tests to deﬁne their level of

knowledge in English. The students, who were cho-

sen for participating in the experiment, had the ini-

tial levels of the English knowledge proﬁciency B1-

B2 according to CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001). A

total of 90 students participated in the programme of

integrated teaching.

The course lasted 1 semester (2018–2019) and had

56 hours of in-class activities along with 50 hours of

out-of-class work. The classes were held 2 times a

week. The work was conducted at the major subject

classes according to the syllabus. But the teaching

was done in the English language. As it is still an ex-

perimental research, it means that no extra time was

added to the educational process. Thus, our intention

was to save time for learning two disciplines simulta-

neously and to connect these disciplines reducing the

gap between the professional subject and a foreign

language which are usually taught separately in the

Ukrainian Universities therefore the students are not

always able to combine these two pieces of knowl-

edge into one unity.

With the purpose of comparing the efﬁciency

of different ways of teaching the professional En-

glish language all students were divided into two

groups: experimental (our teaching strategies) and

control (here the students learned their major sub-

ject in the native language and had English classes

studying by course book “English for Economists”

by Aghabekyan and Kovalenko (Aghabekyan and Ko-

valenko, 2004)). The difference in their studying was

in the content and character of educational activities,

educational texts and the balance of different kinds of

work at the lesson.

At the beginning of the research work a structured

questionnaire was used as an instrument for data col-

lection. The purpose was to ﬁnd out the students’ atti-

tude to the integrated teaching course. 90 students of

the 2-nd course were questioned.

There were 6 questions which included such

items:

1. How do you understand the word “integration”?

2. Do you know what an integrated teaching means?

3. What subjects can be integrated?

4. Have you already had any experience of inte-

grated teaching at university?

5. Would you like to attend integrated classes?

6. Is it important to have a good command of English

to attend integrated classes?

On the basis of the questionnaire the following an-

swers were obtained. As for the ﬁrst question practi-

cally the students gave a bit different but correct an-

swers how they understood the word “integration” in

general. For example, “Integration is the act of bring-

ing together smaller components into a single system

that functions as one unity” (40%), “Integration is

a process of combining or coordinating separate el-

ements so as to provide a harmonious, interrelated

whole” (30%), “Integration is the action or process

of combining two or more things in an effective way”

(15%), “Integration occurs when separate people or

things are brought together” (10%). And 5% of re-

spondents didn’t answer at all.

The second question about “integrated teaching”

was understood by 70% of students and 30% were not

sure that they were aware of this term. Some students

referred to a way of connecting skills and knowl-

edge from multiple sources and experiences (30%),

The other part of students said that it meant apply-

ing skills and practice from different subjects (25%).

The following respondents answered that it simply

meant bridging connection between academic knowl-

edge and practical work (10%). The smallest num-

ber of students pointed out that it was deﬁned as the

organization of teaching matter to interrelate the sub-

jects which are frequently taught in separate academic

courses or departments (5%).

Answering the third question the students men-

tioned different subjects, among them there were

some foreign languages, for example, English and

German or English and Spain (50%), music and lit-

erature (20%), music and ﬁne arts (15%), literature

and culture (10%), physics and astronomy (5%). An-

swering the fourth question all the students declared

that they did not have such experience at University.

But 5% of students mentioned that they had such an

experience at school.

The ﬁfth question conﬁrmed the wish of the stu-

dents to attend the integrated classes: 90% said that

they would willingly attend such classes, 10% were

indifferent. And the sixth question showed that all

the respondents (100%) understood the importance of

knowledge of a foreign language to attend integrated

classes especially if the lectures are given in English.

Thus, on the basis of the questionnaire the con-

clusion about the students’ aspiration to have an in-

tegrated course of teaching at their University was

drawn that proved the necessity of introducing the in-

tegrated teaching into the educational process.

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

520

2.2 Apparatus and Materials

The research was based on the author‘s integrated

course “Global economic problems of today and ways

to solve them” designed for the 2-nd-year students.

The theoretical major discipline “Microeconomics”

was the basis of it. It comprises such topics as: “In-

troduction to microeconomics; Market economy sys-

tem; Supply and demand; The production of eco-

nomic beneﬁts; Production costs and proﬁts; Market

models; Labour market; Income distribution; Capi-

tal and Land Markets” which were specially prepared

for students by the lecturer of this subject, translated

into English and checked up by the native speaker. It

has the same material on “Microeconomics” that the

students learned at their professional classes but in a

concise variant. As for the methodological point of

view the course provided the constant use of the lexi-

cal material under study in various semantic aspects in

speech that is repeated from text to text. New lexical

units from the ﬁrst theme were involved into the sec-

ond theme, new lexical units from the second theme

– to the third theme, etc. They were used in different

contexts and in various derivative forms (for exam-

ple, to compete – competition – competitor – compet-

itive), thus ensuring their multiple repetition, that is

considered obligatory for the complete mastering of

lexical material, according to Martynova (Martynova,

2016) theory because it does not allow words to be

forgotten. The speech material increases from text to

text, both in volume and in content. New words from

all the following topics are added to the general list of

words and also begin to be repeated from lessons to

lesson. Such organization of the speech material helps

the effective memorization of the linguistic units un-

der study, their relatively complete mastering and the

possibility of their use in various types of speech ac-

tivity.

2.3 Procedure

The integration of a major subject and a foreign lan-

guage is recommended to be implemented at three

stages of the educational process. It requires deﬁnite

strategies to maximise the students’ mastering at each

stage.

Training at the ﬁrst stage is aimed at mastering the

foreign language vocabulary with the help of which

the major subject is expressed in English. This step is

proved by the words of Cenoz (Cenoz, 2015) who in-

dicates that the language of the subject content should

be accessible and understandable to provide mutual

interaction. The parts of the subject content and

the sequence of their learning are determined by the

teachers of the deﬁnite subject. Therefore, all foreign

language activities in both the semantic and method-

ological aspects depend on the essence and scope of

each part of the subject material under study. How-

ever, from the beginning of the integrated teaching,

the knowledge of the foreign language means, with

the help of which the subject content is expressed, is

very limited, and the presentation of the professional

information in a foreign language turns out to be im-

possible. That is why the speech potential of a for-

eign language at this stage is low. It corresponds only

to the ability to perceive and comprehend the concep-

tual apparatus of the deﬁnite part of the theme, to ex-

plain the essence of the presented terminology and to

demonstrate its understanding in mini-texts.

A foreign language dominates at this stage and is

considered to be an educational objective. The pro-

fessional subject is considered to be an educational

means. Language units are extracted from the content

of the major subject. At the language level, the units

to learn are terms and set lexical and grammatical ex-

pressions. At the speech level, there are sentences

with the help of which the concepts under study are

interpreted, the essence of the laws under study is

clariﬁed, the meaning of any professional action is ex-

plained.

As for the methods of teaching, it is recommended

to use the following ones at this stage:

1) presenting new professional concepts (for ex-

ample, “expenditure, proﬁts, revenue, bonus is-

sue”) using different techniques: a semantic con-

cept map, multimedia presentation, explanation,

demonstration the words use in different profes-

sional environments;

2) note-taking new concepts marking them with dif-

ferent colours;

3) deﬁning new concepts;

4) comparing existing deﬁnitions of one concept

given by different scholars;

5) explaining the difference in the formulations of

one concept;

6) demonstrating the examples of use in different lin-

guistic professional environments;

7) compiling semantic tables;

8) guessing the terminological riddles / crosswords;

9) writing the terminological dictations;

10) watching mini-video fragments selected by teach-

ers where the new words are used in professional

contexts.

The following visual aids must be obligatory used

at this stage of teaching: tables, schemes, economic

charts, multimedia.

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching

521

Training at the second stage is aimed at perceiv-

ing and understanding the main content of the subject

material under study presented in a foreign language.

This professional material must not contain unfamil-

iar linguistic phenomena that allow students perceiv-

ing the material freely (the initial presentation of pro-

fessional information occurs orally in the form of an

interactive lecture). The integrated nature of such

methodological actions is manifested in the simulta-

neous mastering of two subjects. On the one hand,

students receive professional (major subject) knowl-

edge, and on the other hand, they develop foreign lan-

guage skills.

Thus, at the second stage, we have both educa-

tional and foreign language speech activities which

act parallel. A foreign language and a subject of pro-

fessional activity act both as an educational objective

and educational means.

Educational activity as an objective is develop-

ing better at the expense of the subject knowledge,

which is acquired by using a foreign language; and

as a means, it presents a source of content for for-

eign language functioning. That is why the speech

unit of teaching is a subject-oriented lecture material

at the beginning, and then a written text, which, dur-

ing the increase of the educational activities potential

gradually reduces its level of adaptability to complete

authenticity in the process of integrated teaching.

As for the synthesized methods of teaching, at the

second stage it is recommended to use the following:

1) an oral presentation of foreign language lecture

material;

2) note-taking of lecture material;

3) short answering to the questions on the text of lec-

tures;

4) detailed answering to the questions on the text of

lectures;

5) tests for understanding the material of the lecture;

6) reading a printed version of the text of the lecture;

7) writing down the main items of the lecture mate-

rial;

8) analysis of the economic tables and diagrams;

9) having a talk on the content of the lecture;

10) watching a fragment of the recorded authentic ver-

sion of the lecture from London Business School

on the same topic.

The following visual aids must be obligatory used

at this stage of teaching: tables of digital indicators of

economic processes, schemes of economic processes,

formulae for calculating economic efﬁciency, detailed

plans of lectures (Baklanova et al., 2020).

Training at the third stage is aimed at the simulta-

neous development of skills for the practical appli-

cation of professional and foreign language knowl-

edge. The speech potential of a foreign language at

this stage grows up to such an extent that it is used

as a means of improving professional knowledge, as

well as a means of using it in the practical training. At

the same time, the students don’t have to concentrate

on the form of their thoughts but have to do it blind-

folded. This fact, in its turn, allows having a com-

plete focus on the content of the subject under study.

Therefore, at this stage, a foreign language loses its

targeted use. The educational activity, on the contrary,

assumes the main accent. At this stage, two activi-

ties are equally implemented: educational – dominant

and foreign-language – supporting. The educational

action is planned, carried out and evaluated by means

of a foreign language.

As for the synthesized methods of training at the

third stage it is recommended to use the following:

1) searching new additional information on the topic

under study, choosing the most important items

and presenting them as a connected text;

2) describing textual and graphical information of

economic indicators;

3) expressing opinions on a professional topic;

4) solving problem tasks and commenting on the

process of their solutions;

5) modelling the real professional situations and

their dramatizing;

6) preparing and presenting the report on the current

economic situation in the country;

7) implementing the project tasks on the deﬁnite

topic;

8) interviewing the representatives of ﬁnancial struc-

tures;

9) conducting meetings with the leading specialists

of the enterprises;

10) work with electronic cases based on the authen-

tic documentation of the enterprises as a practical

application of the obtained knowledge.

The following visual aids must be obligatory

used at this stage of teaching: economic docu-

ments, graphs, tables, diagrams with digital infor-

mation, video presentations, illustrating slides, elec-

tronic cases.

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522

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The main indicators of the effectiveness of the offered

strategies of integrating a major subject and a foreign

language were the following: the quality of the for-

eign language proﬁciency, the quality of the profes-

sional economic knowledge mastering and the quality

of the English speech development.

According to the results of the pedagogical ex-

periment, we have found out that the students who

were placed in the Experimental Group (EG), have

achieved better results that the students of the Con-

trol Group (CG). They have progressed in developing

their integrated skills and mastering:

1) professional terminology in English;

2) professional economic knowledge that corre-

sponds to the content of their major subject;

3) ﬂuency of the English-language speech (perceiv-

ing and understanding the English speech; pro-

ducing a coherent, logical, lexically and grammat-

ically correct English speech).

To measure the students’ knowledge and skills,

the assessment test was conducted. The following cri-

teria were chosen: 1) linguistic (ability to produce ad-

equately generally-used lexical units, economic terms

/ notions under study, terminological phrases and sep-

arate sentences on a certain professional topic and to

ﬁnd equivalents from their mother tongue) – maxi-

mum 30 points; 2) professional (the ability to under-

stand and reproduce professional information in En-

glish according to the theme under study) – maximum

30 points, 3) communicative (the ability to communi-

cate in English on the professional theme without pre-

liminary preparation) – maximum 40 points. The in-

dicators of assessment criteria of students’ skills were

measured by means of 100 scores according to the

ECTS scale that uses gradation of A, B, C, D, E, F.

The obtained data were analysed using Microsoft Ex-

cel.

The pre-test was held during class time at the be-

ginning of the school year (September 2018). It was

based on the English linguistic material and the pro-

fessional topics that the students had learned the pre-

vious year according to their University curriculum.

Ability to produce adequately the linguistic material

under study was veriﬁed by means of translating the

word combinations and sentences: a) from the En-

glish language into the mother tongue, that corre-

sponds to receptive lexical knowledge; b) from the

mother tongue to the English language, that corre-

sponds to reproductive lexical knowledge. The fol-

lowing results were obtained: the average score of lin-

guistic proﬁciency of the EG students was 50%, CG

students – 51%.

The presence of professional economic knowl-

edge was veriﬁed by means of doing the professional

tests in English: a) to choose the correct answer of

the given ones, b) to choose the odd variant of 4 given

items, c) to explain in English the given professional

terms or phenomena. According to the second crite-

rion, the average score of EG students was 35%, CG

students – 36%.

The ability to communicate in English on the pro-

fessional themes was tested by means of such tasks:

1) to answer the teacher’s questions on the profes-

sional topic, using the correct English language mate-

rial and showing the professional knowledge; 2) to de-

scribe in English the professional information which

is presented in a diagram/graph; 3) to compose a short

report on one of the themes under study and reproduce

it in English (not more than 10 sentences). The an-

swers of the students were ﬁxed by means of record-

ing and later examined by the researcher and his as-

sistants. According to the third criterion, the average

score of EG students was 40%, CG students – 42%.

Table 1: Pre-test comparing EG and CG results, %.

Group Linguistic Professional Communicative

EG 50 35 40

CG 51 36 42

The pre-test indicated approximately the same ini-

tial level of EG and CG students’ language proﬁ-

ciency skills and professional skills.

At the end of the research the post-test on the stu-

dents’ integrated skills in English to prove the validity

of the offered teaching strategies, was conducted. The

students of EG and CG performed the identical tasks

on the topics which both groups learned during the

semester. The results are shown in table 2.

According to the linguistic criterion, 75% of EG

students demonstrated the ability to produce ade-

quately the linguistic material under study and 60%

of CG students did it. According to the second crite-

rion, 78% of EG students demonstrated the ability to

understand and reproduce English professional infor-

mation according to the theme under study and only

45% of CG students succeeded in it. According to

the third criterion, 77% of EG students demonstrated

the English speech development and only 58% of CG

students succeeded in it.

The tasks that the students fulﬁlled according to

Table 2: Post-test comparing EG and CG results, %.

Group Linguistic Professional Communicative

EG 75 78 77

CG 60 45 58

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching

523

the third criterion at the post-test:

1) to answer 5 teacher’s questions on the profes-

sional topic “Market economy system”, using the

correct English language material and showing

the professional knowledge;

2) to describe in English the professional informa-

tion which is presented in the given:“Cash” =

25000 (“Payments for wages”) + 3500 (“Receiv-

able of accountable persons”) + 500 (“Adminis-

trative expenses”) = 29000;

3) to compose a short report on one of the themes

under study and reproduce it in English, for ex-

ample, “Give the analysis of the ﬁnancial system

in the USA, the United Kingdom and Ukraine”.

Judging on the obtained results it can be stated that

there were differences between pre-test and post-test

among all the groups of the research. From the post-

test results of table 2, it is evident that the coefﬁcient

of learning was greater than 0.7 (70%) in EG in all the

criteria (they were the following: 1 – 75%, 2 – 78%,

3 – 77%).

While the coefﬁcient of learning in CG in all the

criteria was lower than 0.7 (70%) (they were the fol-

lowing: 1 – 60%, 2 – 45%, 3 – 58%). The obtained

outcomes of EG proved the effectiveness of the inte-

grated teaching and its positive inﬂuence on profes-

sional knowledge development and foreign language

proﬁciency. That means, according to Bespalko’s

knowledge diagnostics, the test is considered passed

when the coefﬁcient is > 0.7. It is considered reli-

able (Bespalko, 1989). The summarized comparative

results are presented in table 3.

These summarized comparative results show dif-

ferences between pre-test and post-test among all the

groups of the research and make it possible to draw

a conclusion that integrated teaching the English lan-

guage and a major subject to the students majoring

in economics improves the students’ foreign language

communication skills and professional skills.

At the end of the semester, the ﬁnal questionnaire

concerning the students’ attitude to the conducted in-

tegrated teaching course was carried out. There were

4 questions which included such items:

1. How can you evaluate the conducted integrated

course? (positive / indifferent / negative)

2. What positive things can you name after study-

ing?

3. Did you understand the major material in English?

4. What difﬁculties did you experience?

On the basis of the questionnaire the following an-

swers were obtained. As for the ﬁrst question, 95%

of students positively evaluated the integrated teach-

ing technique (55% emphasized that they improved

both language proﬁciency and professional knowl-

edge; 23% stated that they started to understand the

subject content much better; 9% said that they could

easily make a professional report in English; 8% an-

swered that they had already used English while inter-

acting with foreign colleagues) and only 5% showed

an indifferent attitude.

As for the second question, the positive things that

students can name after studying are the following:

increased motivation for learning English to under-

stand the professional material in a foreign language

(40%); dual-focused character of the teaching process

(25%); unusual experience (20%); the feeling of self-

perfection (10%); nothing interesting (5%).

As for the third question, the students gave such

answers: I understood practically everything (15%),

I understood the most part of the material (20%); I

understood half of the material (40%); I experienced

difﬁculties in understanding but I got the general ideas

(20%); I understood practically nothing (5%).

As for the fourth question concerning experienced

difﬁculties, the students mentioned such things: prob-

lems in listening to the material in a foreign language

though in a written form I understood practically ev-

erything (45%), problems in quick writing the lec-

ture in English (35%), problems in ﬂuent answering

in front of the group in a foreign language (20%).

Thus, the questioning also showed the effective-

ness and the need of introducing integrated teach-

ing into the educational process of Ukrainian tertiary

schools. It should be noted that the ﬁnal question-

naire acted only as a supportive means of proving the

validity of the experiment and helped the researchers

in evaluating the students’ attitude to integrated teach-

ing.

The obtained results give grounds to consider the

developed strategies of integrated teaching both ef-

ﬁcient and technological. Thus, during the experi-

ment, the following strategies of the integrated teach-

ing were set: 1) a systematic repetition of the lin-

guistic and professional material; 2) the use of each

language unit, which is under study, in its maximum

possible linguistic and professional environments and

in connection with the previously learned material in

all kinds of speech activity; 3) the implementation of

a major subject and a foreign language integration in

the educational process of Ukrainian tertiary schools

by means of three-stage work. At the ﬁrst stage a for-

eign language dominates and is considered to be an

educational objective; the subject of professional ac-

tivity acts as an educational means. At the second

stage a foreign language and a subject of professional

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524

Table 3: Post-test comparing EG and CG results, %.

Group

Linguistic Professional Communicative

Pre-test Post-test Pre-test Post-test Pre-test Post-test

EG 40 75 35 78 40 77

CG 41 60 36 45 42 58

activity act equally as an educational objective and an

educational means. At the third stage the professional

activity completely dominates over the foreign lan-

guage activity and a foreign language only supports

the professional activity performing.

Analyzing the existing points concerning integra-

tion content, it should be noted that Taillefer (Taille-

fer, 2013) states that language and non-language con-

tent do not dominate of one over the other; it is in

balance, so that students could share their efforts and

interests equally but the language needed depends on

the content. Cenoz (Cenoz, 2015) on the contrary in-

dicates that cognition competence should prevail over

linguistic competence. We partially agree with both

statements because in our opinion, the aim of the

foreign language learning is not identical during the

whole education period: at the ﬁrst stage of learning,

a foreign language dominates and is considered to be

a main educational objective, at the second stage –

both a foreign language and a major subject are in

balance and don’t dominate of one over the other; at

the third stage – the situation changes cardinally, the

subject content becomes a main educational objective

and a foreign language starts playing only a support-

ive role.

This idea is disclosed by Gierlinger (Gierlinger,

2007) who identiﬁes three issues of language: the lan-

guage of learning; the language for learning and the

language through learning. It means that the com-

munication and language learning go far beyond just

learning grammar rules or vocabulary and have dif-

ferent objectives at different stages of education. We

completely support this idea and proved its validity

and reliability by the present research.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The detailed analysis of scientiﬁc literature shows that

integrated teaching has become an integral part of

modern educational tendencies both in Ukraine and

in the world, offering a wide range of possibilities for

students. Such method opens up a new horizon for

improving the Ukrainian education system and atten-

tion to diversity, as it provides resources and teach-

ing aids with enormous potential for enhancing non-

linguistic students’ training.

The integration of a major subject and a foreign

language is recommended to be implemented at three

stages of the educational process. It requires deﬁnite

strategies to maximise the students’ mastering at each

stage.

Having analyzed the existing ways of integrated

teaching, the following advantages of its use were

found out: raising learners’ linguistic and profes-

sional competence without spending extra time to

teaching two different subjects; increasing students’

motivation to learning foreign languages and reﬂec-

tions on their professional experience; developing

learners’ cognitive ﬂexibility, communication skills,

professional interaction proﬁciency, and thus enhanc-

ing future economists’ employability for the labour

market and their chances to integrate into the world

community.

Speaking about the methodological strategies, the

following ones were developed and introduced into

practice: a systematic repetition of the linguistic and

professional material; the use of each language unit,

which is under study, in its maximum possible lin-

guistic and professional environments and in con-

nection with the previously learned material in all

kinds of speech activity; the implementation of a ma-

jor subject and a foreign language integration in the

educational process of Ukrainian tertiary schools by

means of three-stage work. At the ﬁrst stage a for-

eign language dominates and is considered to be an

educational objective. At the second stage a foreign

language and a subject of professional activity act

equally as an educational objective and an educational

means. At the third stage the professional activity

dominates over the foreign language and the latter one

only supports it.

Despite a great popularity of integrated teaching

in the world, Ukrainian Universities don’t participate

in the international competition offering ETBs to stu-

dents and still have curricula where major subjects

and a foreign language are taught according to differ-

ent syllabi, not having interdisciplinary connections.

Evaluating the effect of integrated teaching by the

obtained results it was noted that all the students of the

experimental group got more than 70% of the average

score of in all the criteria: linguistic (75%), profes-

sional (78%) and communicative (77%) demonstrat-

ing good listening and speaking skills, knowledge of

economic terminology, the terms variation and com-

Expanding Opportunities for Professional Development through the Use of Integrated Teaching

525

bination, skills of producing linguistic units at the

level of the word, phrase and text within the scope

of the material under study. The students were able

to solve professional communicative tasks. In addi-

tion to mastering a foreign language, the students re-

ceived profound professional knowledge in Microe-

conomics.

We see the perspectives of our future research in

organizing the process of integrated teaching using

computer-based learning technologies as a means of

intensiﬁcation of the teaching process.

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