Theoretical and methodological foundations of teaching English to musical students of higher educational institutions

Abstract

In the context of the transformation of higher professional education and the increasing requirements for language training of creative specialists, the aim of the study was the theoretical substantiation and experimental verification of the theoretical and methodological foundations of teaching English to music students in higher education institutions of musical specialization. Over a period of five years, 482 students majoring in «Instrumental Performance», «Vocal Art» and «Musicology» were examined at three leading music universities. The research methods included theoretical literature analysis, content analysis of 58 syllabi, surveys, testing, ascertaining and formative experiments, mathematical statistics (Student’s t-test, Pearson correlation analysis, calculation of the coefficient of information extraction completeness), as well as expert evaluations by teachers and native speakers. An author’s model of professionally oriented instruction was developed, integrating music theoretical knowledge and specialized foreign-language vocabulary, and based on the consideration of musicians’ psychophysiological characteristics (developed musical ear, sense of rhythm, figurative thinking). The results demonstrated a statistically significant increase in lexical and grammatical accuracy, speech fluency, and motivation in the experimental groups compared with the control groups; the integrated efficiency indicator was 38,4% higher, and the gap in understanding authentic C1-level texts by the coefficient of information extraction completeness was more than twice that of the control group. Strong correlations were revealed between rhythmic sense and foreign-language speech fluency, melodic ear and intonational expressiveness, confirming the potential of purposefully using musical abilities as a resource for accelerated phonetic competence development. The prospects for differentiated instruction based on individual cognitive profiles and for integrating the developed methodology into existing educational standards of creative universities are discussed, which makes it possible to consider the proposed system as an effective tool for training a competitive musician prepared for professional communication in the international cultural space.