Keyword: «semiotic-symbolic activity»

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to ensure continuity in the development of semiotic and symbolic skills in engineering students during the transition from secondary general education to professionally oriented foreign language instruction at university. The contradiction lies in the fact that basic skills in handling signs and symbols acquired at school do not ensure their automatic transfer into foreign-language professional communication without special methodological support. The aim of the work is to identify the lines of continuity in the development of these skills and to substantiate the methodological conditions for their effective actualization in the foreign-language environment of a technical university. The methodological framework is based on a systems approach, an analysis of semiotic and graphic means used in engineering practice, and the structure of professional competences as defined by the Federal State Educational Standard for Higher Education. The results of the study have shown that the key deficit is not the absence of skills as such, but the lack of formed strategies for recoding information (verbal into graphic and vice versa), interpreting foreign-language symbols and notations, and comparing national symbolic systems. A gap has been identified between analytical-synthetic skills in the native language and their productive use when working with foreign-language technical texts. The scientific novelty lies in the substantiation of three lines of development of semiotic and symbolic skills in the process of foreign-language training of engineers: transfer (the transfer of basic skills), adaptation (mastering the specifics of foreign-language symbols and standards), and integration (the synthesis of verbal and non-verbal means for solving professional tasks). The theoretical significance consists in clarifying the concept of "symbolic-graphic skills" as applied to teaching a foreign language at a technical university. The practical significance is determined by the developed methodological toolkit, which includes a system of tasks on recoding information, comparing symbolic systems, and a set of authentic texts with a graphic component, enabling the targeted development of skills in future engineers for independent work with symbolic and graphic information in a foreign language.