Self-assessment as the component of foreign language communicative competence in professional interaction

Introduction. The topic of the research is current due to its insufficient development in the field of teaching foreign languages in a non-linguistic institute. The paper concerns the practice of students’ assessing their communicative competences through certain types of self-guided learning. The aim is to outline the strategies used by the learners to estimate their communicative competence, in particular: dealing with video- and audio-materials in the computer classroom; studying new words (at the stage of building lexical skills as an integral component of foreign language communicative competence); and also to analyze the relation between self-assessment and setting personal goals. Маterials and Methods. The study of self-assessment and analysis of its results is carried out on the basis of such types of self-guided activity as self-study of video- and audio-materials in a computer classroom, work with periodical publications and questioning (diaries, portfolio, etc.). The paper contains several kinds of questionnaires: general; devoted to particular topics; according to the method of working with certain aspect of communicative competence. The following methods were employed: study of scientific literature, analysis, questioning. Results and Discussion. The ways of applying self-assessment in particular learning activity were examined. The authors managed to establish the interconnection between self-assessment and setting further personal goals in studying a foreign language (for example, within a particular topic). Conclusions. Self-assessment leads to students’ awareness of necessity to set personal goals (for example, expand lexicon, improve grammar, etc.). The authors describe the character of connection between self-assessment and setting of further personal goals according to the type of learning activity, aspect of foreign language professional communication under study. This connection is most evident in self-study of video- and audio-materials in a computer classroom; this connection is more deferred in self-study of periodical publications and writing annotations. Filling in the brief questionnaires at the end of the lesson helps the students to summarize “today’s” experience of communicating in a foreign language and analyze effectiveness of their work at the lesson and set the goals for the next time; while questioning conducted for establishing basic strategies of studying a particular aspect of foreign language professional communication enables the learners to view the results of their work in a more global way and set long-term goals.