Communicative tasks of foreign language teaching in a non-linguistic institution of higher education

The work looks at the problem of teaching professionally oriented reading to specialists in a technical institution of higher education. Special attention is paid to the ratio of humanitarian and technical components in foreign language teaching. The work discusses various kinds of reading in the professionally oriented teaching of university students: skimming, scanning, intensive and extensive reading. The kinds of reading are distributed according to stages of education and level of foreign language mastery. The work also touches upon the problem of the content of educational material, which has to be of interest to students and be valuable in mastering certain specialized sphere. Reading is viewed as both goal and means of education. Attention is given to forming the students'' ability to work independently with language material. The problem of considering the motivation of students is viewed as one of the conditions of professionally oriented education.