LINGUISTIC FEAURES AND LINGUODIDACTIC VALUE OF PROFESSION-ORIENTED PRECEDENT TEXTS WHEN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGE READING TO ENGINEERING POSTGRADUATES

The increased importance of reading professional literature in English coupled with the avalanche-like increase in access to information justifies the search for new approaches to profession-oriented foreign language education, including profession-oriented reading. A secondary linguistic persona can be formed in the course of study in a Master of Engineering program, among other things, through reading profession-oriented precedent texts. We define profession-oriented precedent texts as the ones that possess special significance for the research or professional activity of a specialist, primarily authentic scientific articles. The purpose of this study was to analyze the lexical structure of professional precedent texts through the Vocabprofile resource. The analysis revealed the following categories: the first thousand most frequent English words (K1); the second most frequent thousand English words (K2), vocabulary found in the Academic Word List (K3), words not included in any of the previous categories, mainly terms and professional lexis (K4).The results of the analysis and the comparison with popular and instructional technical texts offered to the engineering undergraduates in the English-language course reveal a larger percentage and a wider and more diverse lexical repertoire of the Academic Word List for the precedent texts. The percentage of terms and professional lexis in both types of texts is approximately the same, which indicates the adequacy of the profession-oriented course of English taught to the undergraduates of the Bauman MSTU. The results also point to the importance of the Academic Word List when teaching reading of professional precedent texts in English.