Writing an essay as an effective means of teaching English at an engineering university

The article considers a set of strategies for teaching functional literacy in junior courses of the Railway University by the example of teaching essay writing in English classes. The article presents the types of direct and indirect strategies, their linguistic and pragmatic contents. The authors base the practice of teaching writing within the framework of the activity approach to learning and the theory of activity, which links internal activity with the process of thinking, memory, psychological processes and conditions, while external activity is always focused on a certain goal and is aimed at achieving results. External and internal activities are interrelated and depend on each other, so the learning process is most effective when it relies on both types of activities. Considerable attention is paid to the layout of an academic essay, its composition and stylistic features. The necessity of teaching argumentative writing is based on linguistic and metalinguistic analysis of the text. The authors summarize their own practical experience in teaching writing essays and describe in detail five areas to implement educational strategies. The article also discusses the key criteria for evaluating students’ essays. Based on the study of empirical data, the authors conclude that there is a direct relationship between the choice of teaching methods and strategies and achieving good results.