ABOUT SOME ASPECTS OF FORMING THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPETENCY OF TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AT THE LESSONS OF ENGLISH

Statement of the problem. At present, the teaching of a foreign language at a technical university rests on a competency-based approach. An important role in the linguistic education of the future specialists plays the formation of the students’ sociolinguistic competency, which is traditionally included in the structure of the sociocultural competency according to the national methodology.The formation of the sociolinguistic competency of the technical university students at the lessons of English has its distinctive features and is associated with introducing them to the culture and history of the country of the studied language, working with authentic professionally oriented materials, studying the norms of the native speakers’ communication behavior, the phenomena of territorially and socially determined linguistic variability. Results. The research that has been carried out gives reason to argue that the students’ typical mistakes and difficulties associated with the choice of the geographically determined phonetic variants and the geographically and socially determined lexical variants in the process of communication indicate that the sociolinguistic competency of the students is formed insufficiently. Conclusion. The focus of the teacher’s attention on the formation of the sociolinguistic competency in the educational process, explaining to the students the nature of the language variation phenomena, analyzing the reasons for the ambiguity of the nomination in each special case help the students to successfully overcome the problems of choosing a language variant in the communication process, and to become more confident users of English.