Formation of professional foreign language communicative competence of students of non-linguistic universities in the context of digitalization of education

Abstract

The study addresses the development of professional foreign-language communicative competence among students of non-linguistic universities in the context of the digitalization of education, where the demands for readiness to engage in subject-specific professional communication in a foreign language are increasing and traditional approaches show limited effectiveness; the aim of the work is to design and empirically validate an integrated instructional model that combines adaptive platform solutions, virtual simulators of professional situations, and tools for collaborative project-based activity. Materials and methods included a quasi-experiment with a sample of 374 students in technical fields (A2-B1, CEFR), assigned to an experimental (n=188) and a control (n=186) group; the experiment employed an adaptive content manager for individualized learning trajectories, simulators with speech recognition and instant feedback, as well as a group work environment integrated with version control systems and task tracking; assessment was carried out through comprehensive testing of competence components (linguistic, sociolinguistic, discursive, strategic), simulator metrics, expert evaluation of project activity, and descriptive and inferential statistics (t-test, correlation analysis) in SPSS. The results show a statistically significant advantage for the experimental group: an increase in the mean score for lexico-grammatical skills from 44.81 to 69.45 versus 44.32 to 51.17 in the control (p0.001); a reduction in mean response time in simulations to 1982.4 ms versus 3451.7 ms and a decrease in the number of hesitation pauses to 5.13 versus 11.26; an increase in terminological accuracy to 89,7% versus 68,3% and in contextual appropriateness to 4.52 versus 3.11; in the final interdisciplinary project, higher indicators of communicative effectiveness were recorded (8.41 versus 5.72 on a 10-point scale), higher success in solving communicative tasks (92,3% versus 61,5%), and fewer critical errors (1.3 versus 4.8); strong correlations were found between terminological accuracy and overall communicative effectiveness (r=0.81) and between speech fluency and task success (r=-0.74), and group membership accounts for 38-52% of the variance in outcomes. Conclusion: the systemic integration of adaptive learning, speech simulators, and project-based collaboration ensures a significant increase across all components of professional foreign-language competence and can serve as a technological foundation for modernizing language training in technical education; future directions are associated with the implementation of AI-driven personalization, XR simulations, and predictive analytics, as well as transferring the model to corporate training.