Overcoming interlingual interference when teaching ESL vocabulary to engineering students

The paper reviews the lexical aspect of developing communicative competence in engineering students. The research analyzes coordinate and compound bilinguality and gives reasons towards acquiring compound bilinguality as an effective means of overcoming interlingual and intralingual interference. The study emphasizes that the reverse interlingual interference demonstrates the negative impact of a foreign language on a native one. The author proposes several types of exercises to develop compound bilinguality and teach lexical transformation to students. Both direct and translational semantization approaches are considered. Besides, their advantages and disadvantages are revealed. In particular, direct semantization helps students think in a foreign language. At the same time, it is time-consuming, and it depends on the vocabulary size of trainees. Whereas, translational semantization plays an important role in teaching engineering students who are supposed to read professional literature in a foreign language without problems. In conclusion, the study provides vocabulary instructions, as keeping a vocabulary notebook with due care will increase the efficiency of this type of activity.