Foreign Language Acquisition in the System of Universal Competences of a Lawyer: Linguistic and Methodological Aspects of Teaching
The paper puts forward a hypothesis that universal competences stated in the new version of standards of higher education are in fact interdisciplinary soft skills, which are partly formed by means of foreign language teaching of prospective lawyers. The objectives of the article are to explain why general cultural competences have been replaced by universal; provide a survey of world trends in higher education; define the main problems of universal competences formation and substantiate the role of foreign language learning. Finally, the task of the paper is to provide and discuss ways to improve foreign language courses. The following methods have been used in the paper: contrastive analysis of teaching technologies in higher humanitarian education in Russia and abroad; structural and functional semantic analysis of legal terms in Modern English. As a result, the study has shown that of all types of speech activity, analytical (deep) reading produces the greatest effect on soft skills development of prospective lawyers and enhances long-term memory, concentration of attention and critical thinking.