Studying employers’ requirements: a way to increase intrinsic motivation of students

For centuries foreign languages have been an intrinsic part of education. Speaking different languages enabled people to communicate with humans belonging to other cultures, to share knowledge, and to get access to information unavailable in their mother tongues.

Back in the Middle Ages most scientific papers, philosophical treatises, literary works, theological writings and law codes were written in Latin, a language that was native for nobody. To be able to write serious texts for educated readers people had to study Latin. In many educational institutions curricula also included ancient Greek.

Since then, foreign languages are taught worldwide both in schools and in universities. They may differ in different regions depending on the largest neighboring countries and government policies. However, the modern

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Солуянова Ольга Николаевна кандидат педагогических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных языков и профессиональной коммуникации, Национальный исследовательский Московский государственный строительный университет, Москва. Сфера научных интересов: педагогика высшей школы, филология – английский язык. Автор более 40 опубликованных научных работ. SPIN-код: 1371-8542, AuthorID: 656781.

lingua franca is English, as soon as this language combines several distinct advantages.

Firstly, it is the official language of the UK and the USA, the countries that have been dominating in global politics and economy for decades. Moreover, about 30 % of the citizens of India (former British colony), the most populated country of the world, speak English as the associate official language.

Secondly, it is an analytic language with no grammatical genders. This fact considerably facilitates the learning process as students do not have to memorize genders, cases, form-building affixes, etc.

Th irdly, English is widely used in education, especially in universities, and a lot of English textbooks meant for teaching people of any nationality have been published. On the Internet you can find a lot of free and paid resources, including video courses, on English. Furthermore, as of January 2024, 52 % of all websites available had content in the English language. Spanish, being the closest challenger, was used in materials of only 5.5 % of websites¹.

However, nowadays teachers of English (and other foreign languages) in non-linguis-tic universities face a number of challenges.

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One of them is fast-paced development of text processing software, including programs for translation of written and spoken texts. Besides, the new advancements in the field of generative artificial intelligence foster an illusion that you can not only easily translate your own text into the desired language, but you can simply generate a text on any topic directly in the language you need. Another argument against the foreign language studies is the absence of need for this knowledge for one’s future career. Many students claim that they are going to work in Russia for Russian companies that do not require or even expect any foreign language speaking skills from their employees.

The purpose of this study is to find the ways to persuade students that a foreign language can be a competitive advantage in the modern labour market despite fast technology development.

Materials and methods

To conduct the research, we analyzed a number of theoretical papers of scientists and educators related to foreign languages learning, in particular, to motivation, importance of language proficiency for future employment and revision of curricula to meet requirements of employers and labor market. To obtain the information about the labour market situation, online resources of recruiting companies and vacancy sections of corporate websites were studied. Special attention was paid to Rosatom since it is one of few Russian construction and technology companies that has been working in foreign markets for decades without business interruption.