PROFESSIONALLY-ORIENTED CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL) COURSE IN HIGHER EDUCATION PERSPECTIVE

The article argues that combination of ESP - CLIL - EMI methodologies constitute a model of English language teaching at a modern university, in which the focus of learning a foreign language is gradually shifted from purely linguistic aspects in ESP to tantamount content & language integration in CLIL and further to the dominance of professionally-oriented aspects in EMI, as shown on the scale of linguistic vs content aspects of integration. The authors also notice that the nature of CLIL methodology stems from the choice of basic discipline, supporting this statement with the examples of CLIL methodology implementation in Russian institutions of higher education. Dual CLIL nature is illustrated by the choice of technical or linguistic discipline as CLIL platform in professional education, with the principles of inductive learning and linguistic minimalism being emphasized. The article also presents an interdisciplinary CLIL course in English created as the result of co-operation between the departments of Foreign Languages and Systems Analysis and Control and the difficulties arising in its realization. This course enabled us to achieve a higher degree of professional focus than in conventional ESP textbooks, for example, in InfoTech. This professionally focused integrated preparatory course aimed at advancing the database terminology is described in terms of CLIL methodology and this paper focuses on the design of the course syllabus and analysis of the two year course approbation. Although students demonstrated good results in the final test at the end of the first year course approbation, indicating that ESP acquisition as well as the acquisition of the Databases fundamentals were successful, the survey highlighted some problem zones. This resulted in modifying the way of teaching the course during the second year approbation. In particular, some elements of the flipped classroom were introduced with the aim of allocating more time for discussing complex concepts of the discipline in class due to the students' becoming familiar with them in advance while doing their homework. The results of the survey conducted at the end of the approbation are discussed and future work plan is outlined.