Specificity of teaching students of non-linguistic specialities reading English

We consider current problem of teaching students of technical institutions reading special texts in English. The subject of research is basic difficulties of teaching and learning, which students and teachers face. The aim of the research is to reveal the typical reasons of emerging difficulties while teaching students reading authentic English texts and to search the effective ways to overcome the difficulties. By methods of enquiry and observation, systematization of existing evidence on this subject and basing on the authors’ experience, it is concluded that one of the difficulties of an authentic special article, together with the lexical and grammatical component, while teaching students of non-language specialties reading, appears a huge volume of a text, that is psychologically difficult to overcome for students with insufficient level of language competence. It has been proved that on the initial stage of teaching in a “weak” group of students, for more effective work, it is recommended to divide the text into fragments and share them among all students in the group. So that each student could make hard work at his extract. Difficulties, caused by unknown lexis and complex grammatical constructions, should be discussed with the students, commenting and explaining each case while checking up the task. The importance of teaching reading as one of the leading kinds of speech activity while preparing modern engineers is highlighted and proved by the authors. Practical use of the results of the research is possible while teaching a foreign language in non-linguistic institutions.