Keyword: «non-linguistic university; multimedia presentation»

In the modern context of reduced class hours, increased number of students in the group and different levels of language proficiency among students of non-linguistic universities, mastering professional economic vocabulary in English is accompanied by objective difficulties. The problem is further compounded by specific features of economic terminology, such as a high degree of term usage, a large share of abbreviations, foreign borrowings, metaphorical and cliché formations, which cause students to struggle with pronunciation, spelling and semantic interpretation of lexical units. The relevance of this study is derived from the insufficiently developed methods of systemizing economic vocabulary units by using multimedia technologies. The aim of the article is to identify and systemize the main difficulties encountered by students of non-linguistic universities while studying English economic vocabulary through the creation of a multimedia presentation by each participant, as well as to analyze the opportunity of using this type of work for self-diagnosis and possible adjustment of the learning process. The research is based on lexical approach, the principle of visual instruction and the activity-based approach. The experiment, which lasted one academic year, involved 110 first-year students majoring in Economics in three universities of Samara. The participants reordered difficult lexical items, classified them into three types of difficulties (phonetic, orthographic and semantic) and presented the results in multimedia presentations. The results showed that 100% of the presentations contained word groups selected on a sematic basis (difficulties in understanding the meaning), whereas phonetic groups appeared in 40% of the presentations and orthographic groups in 57 %. Typical subgroups of phonetic, orthographic (silent consonants, double letters, foreign borrowings) and semantic (figurative meaning, pseudo-internationalisms, incorrect identification of parts of speech) difficulties were identified. The theoretical value of the article consists of the systematization of lexical difficulty types (phonetic, orthographic, semantic) as applied to economic terminology, as well as in refining the potential of multimedia presentations as a diagnostic tool. The practical value is that the method proposed can be used by foreign language instructors at non-linguistic universities to organize the students’ independent work, identify problem areas in mastering professional vocabulary and make adjustments to the content of Business English courses.