Regional content foreign language communicative training as a mean of preparation of “Applied informatics” programme students for international academic exchange

This article is devoted to the issues of developing foreign-language communicative competence of master's degree students majoring in “Applied Informatics” with a minor of “Ergodesign of user’s interface” who apply for academic exchange programmes that presuppose studying the basics of Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design. The authors suggest foreign language communicative training as the main technology for the development of foreign-language communicative competence. This technology presupposes creation of special conditions for intensive interpersonal interaction. The assignments of the communicative training include regional content that is connected to the field of Informatics and Computer Engineering. The regional content itself reflects the comparison of IT-sphere in Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia and the State of Washington, USA. The article contains examples of real educational cases used in the learning process. The concept of regional content is studied at micro-level and allows creating special communicative training tasks that are based on real professional communicative situations that are significant for the representatives of both regions. Regional content foreign language communicative training allows to prepare Nizhny Novgorod computer science and computer technology specialists for successful interaction with foreign colleagues in the subject of designing user-friendly interfaces s and front end development. The authors present a detailed structural description of experimental training process. The skills of foreign-language dialogic speech that are developed by the means of regional content foreign language communicative training are highlighted. The conclusion of high efficiency of the developed teaching technology is drawn on the basis of the obtained statistical and mathematical data.