Alla Dmitrieva

Mastery of teacher’s empathy forms the foundation for fruitful communicative expertise in daily teacher-student interaction and promotes development of professional self-awareness. Empathy acquisition as a professional competence of a teacher makes an actual task. Solution of which can be achieved by deliberate training and self-training. The present research was targeted at deducting the impact of subjective Teacher-Student empathetic communication on the solution of such didactic tasks as overcoming emotional stress caused by the urgent need to digest masses of vocational information, creative positive teaching and learning media, motivation of general cognition. Within the research, the identification of the actual level of empathy among the English language teachers of the Russian University of Economics named after G.V.Plekhanov (Moscow), all of them having a long record of practical educational experience, was detected. Empathy as a personality feature is the ability to comprehend and share the emotions of another person. Actually, didactics and psychology define the phenomenon of empathy as a personality trait activated in situations of communication, cooperation and behaviour as it is. Researchers and practitioners in different social sciences share the opinion of empathy as one of the most important factors supporting a personality as a whole in its diverse roles. It helps an educator cope with daily most complicated tasks of communication preserving and accumulating competences and resources. Lack of striving to empathetic communication or the loss of it may lead to different problems, from losing contact with learners and colleagues to emotional burn-out. Several psychological techniques were selected to conduct the research. The results showed the probants’ statistically high level of developed empathy, also confirming the authors’ hypothesis of empathy having a significant value for their professional self-awareness. Authors’ observation confirms the idea that empathetic approach (within the humanistic approach) not only supports successful teaching activity but provides positive emotions and desire for creative progressing.

The problem of successful adaptation of each 1st-year student to totally new education mode – university education – is actual in pedagogical practice due to multifactorial nature of the task both for the student him/herself and for the educator. The student requires socialization and integration in the new community. For the teacher the tasks are to facilitate student’s motivation and personal responsibility, as well as to stimulate trust-based intragroup and teacher-students relations. The present research was focused on determination of adaptation factors, implementation of selected psycho-pedagogical techniques, collecting and analyzing of the results. The findings permitted to design the educational process in ESP in accordance with the above purposes, mainly to achieving positive and smooth adaptation to university education and to integration in the new social group. The practical examples supporting the main conclusion of the research concerning the vitality of implementation of techniques stimulating the processes of personality and group adaptation of student beginners are represented in the article.

Soft skills are acknowledged to be the most significant 21st century skills according to experts in the sphere of education. Soft skills involve assertive skills in particular. The authors deal with the notion assertiveness, since interpretation of this term in different studies is ambiguous and is reasoned by specific research objectives, complicacy of the phenomenon and its correlation with other behavioral and communication skills. The article considers the notion assertiveness and describes the techniques and the system of activities aimed to develop economics student's assertive skill in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom. Based on literature review of the issue, the authors consider assertiveness concept in terms of linguistic, socio-psychological, cultural and pragmatic aspects. They advance a hypothesis that linguistic aspect is a means of not only reflection of communicative situation but structuring and managing communication. Since the language structures and manages interaction it is considered relevant and possible to develop assertive skills through teaching verbal interaction assertive techniques at the English language classes. Teaching assertive skills was tested at English classes in undergraduate economics student groups (60 2nd-year students, Faculty of Economics and Law) in Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. The researchers' aim was to increase undergraduate awareness of assertiveness, improve assertive skills by means of using the system of the described activities, implement the practiced student skills in the foreign language interaction, correlate the foreign language entities with assertive techniques and learning technologies, ensuring the skills reinforcement. The teaching included certain techniques and relevant verbal interaction acquisition, insight into cultural specifics, role plays and simulations of real life business situations. The system of techniques and communicative activities is demonstrated within consequent stages of teaching and learning. The practice of teaching and interviewing students at the end of the learning sessions integrated into the course "Foreign Language" proved boosting students' motivation through undergraduates' interest to self-awareness and personal development, improvement of their assertive skills, language and intercultural competences. The research findings might be useful for Business and Professional English teaching and learning.