Analysis of mediation competence in master’s and doctoral students majoring in non-linguistic fields

Introduction. Successful intercultural scientific communication requires the ability to interpret, generalize, and relay received academic information. The listed skills form the basis of mediation. As a consequence, the key request of the modern academic community to higher education is the development of mediation competence at master’s and doctoral levels for the future bilingual communication. The present research aims to develop and test an interactive-discursive technology for the formation of mediation competence in students of a multidisciplinary university while teaching English for professional purposes. Materials and Methods. The study uses the methods of systemic theoretical analysis and methodological modeling, as well as pedagogical observation, generalization of pedagogical experience, and a methodological experiment. The developed technology was tested at SPbPU in 140 students of different scientific fields (103 master's students and 37 doctoral students). Results. When comparing the data from the entrance and final testing, it was found that the level of mediation competence increased in both master’s and doctoral students. The percentage of master’s students who successfully completed the final test was 83 %, while only 49 % of the participants passed the entrance testing. At the same time, the percentage of doctoral students who coped with the proposed final testing was 94 % in comparison to 63 % of students at the entrance stage. Conclusions. The authors developed a universal technology for the formation of mediation competence in a digital educational environment. The technology is based on general scientific and highly specialized academic texts that have all the necessary communicative and discursive characteristics for this type of speech interaction. Moreover, these texts are relevant, which is important for academic discourse in terms of the continuous development of science and technology.