Formation of scientific-analytical and communication skills among students of humanities at the international university (Generation Z Humanities Students at an International University)

Bulgarova Bella Akhmedovna ORCID: 0000-0001-6005-2505 PhD in Philology Associate professor of the Department of Mass Communications, RUDN University named after Patrice Lumumba 117198, Russia, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str.6. bulgarova-ba@rudn.ru Other publications by this author     Tabatabai Sara ORCID: 0009-0003-6165-6978 Postgraduate student, Department of Mass Communications, RUDN University named after Patrice Lumumba 6 Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, 117198, Russia saratabatabayee@gmail.com Other publications by this author     Elias Rula ORCID: 0009-0009-1773-6085 Master's student, Department of Mass Communications, RUDN University named after Patrice Lumumba 6 Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, 117198, Russia 1032229447@rudn.ru

Dzhuma Kayan ORCID: 0009-0002-4117-9281 Master's student, Department of Mass Communications, RUDN University named after Patrice Lumumba 6 Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, 117198, Russia 1032215986@rudn.ru

Generation Z is ready to join the workforce and business. In today's rapidly developing world, the role of higher education institutions is becoming increasingly important in the formation of communicative and scientific-analytical competencies. A new generation of students, known as Generation Z, faced new challenges because of their distinctive characteristics as natives of digital technologies. The advent of online gaming, increasing computerization, and the frequent use of text messages are among the defining characteristics of Generation Z. This generation, in particular, has difficulty deciphering the context due to these factors. The continuous flow of information, commonly referred to as "information noise", is considered the main reason for this generation's unique approach to work and study. In addition, Generation Z's hypertextual perception of reality, which is the result of their constant contact with digital media, has a significant impact on both their personal and social lives ^[15].

While Generation Z is known for its outstanding technical skills, it is also known that they have weaknesses in interpersonal communication skills, commonly referred to as soft skills ^{[16, pp. 119-131]}. This underlines the importance of developing communicative and scientific-analytical competencies among students who are carriers of digital technologies in higher educational institutions.

Research skills are important in the educational and practical activities of students of humanitarian profiles. At the same time, the literature they study involves working with various texts, praxiological analysis, the use of modeling, optimization and algorithmization skills ("a way to form active intellectual activity of students" ^[6]), factual and value judgments and other skills that contribute to the harmonious formation of a modern specialist. Meanwhile, learning in a foreign language environment or in intergroups complicates this process, since it requires not only knowledge of the language in which the training is carried out, but also skills of intercultural communication, through the prism of which it is necessary to implement all areas of scientific, analytical and communicative activities. Meanwhile, such intercultural communication skills as the ability to confidently and argumentatively express their thoughts and opinions in a foreign language when talking with foreign speakers often play a crucial role in the constructive interaction of students in the student body, in intercultural scientific communication, including with teachers of disciplines, and in the future – in a professional environment.

The communication skills of students of humanities can be attributed to "soft competencies" ("soft skills"), the development of which is effectively enhanced through the use of scientific and analytical educational activities. According to the research of S.A. Potutkova (2017), "O. Sosnitskaya considers 'soft skills' through communicative and managerial talents ... and refers to them the ability to convince, lead, manage, make presentations, find the right approach to people, the ability to resolve conflict situations, public speaking, etc." ^{[4, p. 113]}. Jose Magano and his colleagues (2020) argue that as members of Generation Z begin to enter the labor market, it is crucial to provide them with a combination of hard and soft skills to maximize productivity and mitigate their weaknesses. The authors emphasize that the development of soft skills such as communication, collaboration and adaptability will make Generation Z employees especially valuable and indispensable from the point of view of technology ^{[17, p.187]}.  Majid et al. (2019) conducted a study in Singapore with graduate students and employers that emphasized the importance of soft skills for securing employment and achieving a successful and self-fulfilling career. The study revealed a common belief among both students and employers that people of Generation Z should have soft skills adapted to the requirements of the current labor market. In addition, discrepancies were revealed between students' understanding of basic soft skills and the expectations of the business world ^{[18, pp. 7-39]}.

M. Pampaloni, Ph.D. (2022) emphasizes that there is a growing demand for soft skills among Generation Z in various industries and professions. According to SHRM's Workplace Report, problem solving, critical thinking, innovation, creativity, coping with complexity and ambiguity, and communication are among the top three missing skills identified by job seekers in a survey conducted by SHRM. This highlights the importance of teaching these three Gen Z soft skills so that they can be successful and productive in their workplaces. Greg Nugroho, PhD (2018) also emphasizes the importance of soft skills, especially for Generation Z leaders. He argues that while technical skills are necessary to lead a company, the ability to lead others is equally important. He explains that future leaders should have soft leadership skills, such as the ability to inspire and motivate the team, develop long-term relationships with customers, etc. ^{[19, p. 124]}.

Intercultural communication in the context of the educational process, on the one hand, complicates the development of these competencies, on the other hand, requires improving the principles of teaching in the context of cultural dialogues, which determines the formation of the studied skills, taking into account the national and cultural specifics of the studied language and communication of the university where the foreign student is studying. These aspects are a prerequisite for successful integration into a potential professional environment.

Cross-cultural communication leads to inevitable stress due to the confrontation of ingrained assumptions. Our cultural habits, acquired and internalized from early childhood, often act on a subconscious level, making us less aware of them. This gap in awareness becomes apparent when we interact with people whose cultural scenarios differ from our own. The collision of these implicit cultural norms can lead to misunderstandings, emphasizing the need to increase cultural sensitivity and adaptability in intercultural communication ^[12].

The relevance of the formation of the studied skills is determined by the demand of the modern labor market for "soft" (social or "flexible") competencies, including: teamwork; interpersonal communication skills (negotiating with related organizations, management / employees of the company); initiative; the ability to negotiate with clients, conduct scientific intercultural debate, form a constructive learning environment; creativity; adaptive abilities for new formats and localization of places of study, etc. ^[11].

It is important to emphasize that there is still a debate in scientific circles about the definition of such definitions as "competencies", "skills" and "abilities". This study uses the approach of O.L. Chulanova, A.I. Ivonina, Y.M. Davletshina (2016), S.A. Potutkova (2017), who define the concept of "competence" as "a social and labor characteristic, a set of knowledge, skills, and professionally important qualities" ^{[4, p. 112]}, which are formed in students of higher schools.

The researchers identify the main mutually correlative components of scientific, analytical and communicative competencies that need to be mastered in the process of studying at an international university, which will contribute to the development of metacognitive characteristics of students. Scientific and analytical skills include: analysis of specific communicative situations in scientific discourse, the results of monologue, dialogue and polylogue; comparison and comparison of the information received, as well as the search for discrepancies / distortions in it; the ability to draw conclusions, find patterns adequate to the logic of the problem under consideration; differentiation of scientific communicative phenomena (conditions, causes, motives, stimuli means, forms of manifestation, etc.); relevant perception of not only the subject-conceptual meaning of language signs, but also their connotative meanings, including the implicit meaning of the utterance, emotional and figurative coloring in the process of working with a scientific text; productive reading: the skill of working with a large amount of scientific information with subsequent annotation and abstraction of the main the ideas of what was read; systematization of the information received, compilation of ratings, tables; classification, concretization, generalization, schematization of data; the principle of scientific argumentation: the skills to put forward hypotheses, prove them, argue their point of view; the skill to take notes and compile scientific information, including seeking it from a communicant (scientific dispute, conference); the skill to isolate the main scientific task (problem) and determine the best ways to solve it. Communication skills include: intercultural communication skills; tolerance to uncertainty; skills in determining the motives and characteristics of communication, communicative effectiveness, predictive analysis of the consequences of communication for the addressee and addressee; identification of positive and negative aspects of communicative phenomena, actions (norms of communication and deviation); competent interpretation of intonation and signs of non-verbal communication (proxemics, haptics, kinesics, oculistics), the skill of establishing contact on the verbal and non-verbal levels; active listening skills: the ability to listen and hear a communicant, maintain a conversation, convince; storytelling: the ability to concisely and consistently express one's thoughts and opinions; self-presentation skills, mastery of strategies and tactics of communicative influence; public speaking skills, improvisational communication skills; skills to identify the causes of intercommunication barriers and failures.

So, the communicative competencies of students of the studied profile at the international university should be interpreted as 'soft skills', since these "unified skills and personal qualities increase the efficiency of work and interaction with other people" ^{[4, p. 113]}, which is required in professions such as translator, philologist, teacher, social worker, psychologist, manager, etc.

According to the results of a survey conducted by a domestic recruiting company, more than 77% of employers emphasize the relevance of ‘s oft skills’, which also significantly optimize the performance of work, as well as ‘hard skills' (transl. – narrow-profile ("hard") skills) ^{[3, p. 205]}, which include the basic communicative competencies ^{[5, p. 75]} of students of the humanities. Statistics on the demand for "s oft skills" required from candidates in major global organizations of both humanitarian and technical fields ^{[10; 3, p. 217]} include: 30% of graduates who do not possess 's oft skills'; 31% have a deficit in the skill of "innovative" and creative thinking; 32% have a deficit critical thinking skills; 37% lack the skills of "creativity", "decision-making", "problem analysis"; 97% of surveyed companies emphasize that 's oft skills' affect the productivity of potential employees; 90% of employers believe that 's oft skills' training is a valuable means of development and evaluation of potential employees; 97% of employers believe that the synthesis of communication skills, problem solving, teamwork and the spirit of critical thinking, constructive communication, emotional intelligence, etc. are crucial for professional success; 55% of financial directors are convinced that a significant problem when hiring employees is the search for candidates with advanced ‘s oft skills’; 97% of respondents note that ‘s oft skills’ contribute to business growth/success; 93% of all global employer statistics emphasize the importance of ‘s oft skills’ for candidates.

According to the research of O.N. Bakurova and E.D. Puzanova (2019), as well as the content-analytical statistics of M. Gallivan, D. Trix and L. Kvasna, focused on the analysis of ads for several years about the requirements for candidates for an IT position, employers identify "6 types of skills that can be classified as 'soft': communicative, ability to cooperate, leadership qualities, self-motivation, organization and creativity" ^{[1, p. 3; 11]}.

Based on the results of S.A.'s research. Potutkova (2017), in potential professional activities, "success depends on 85% on soft skills, and 15% on hard skills" ^{[4, p. 113]}. J. Okafor (2021) emphasizes that 31% of employers note a shortage of such 's oft skills' as "innovative and creative thinking", 32% – lack of "critical thinking", 37% – lack of skills such as "creativity", "problem analysis" and "decision-making" ^[10].

Innovative technologies aimed at the formation and improvement of professional communication and research skills, which are closely correlated with 's oft skills', should be based on the psychological aspect of communication, which contributes to the constructiveness and enrichment of the results of "two-way information exchange, has a regulatory effect on the process of communicative interaction" ^{[9, p. 4]}. At the same time, the educational trajectory should include such active teaching methods that contribute to a high degree of student involvement in educational activities as: role-playing games, memes as a new generation language, situational tasks and communicative professionally oriented trainings, which are based on tasks of various levels of complexity and orientation, requiring the use of scientific and analytical skills. For example, memes can be used as a creative communication tool of Generation Z to start intercultural group discussions. According to Oliveira (2022), the use of memes in online learning offers various advantages. These include improving cognitive and communicative skills of second language proficiency (L2), increasing awareness of the relationship between language and culture, as well as improving students' pragmatic competence and logical abilities ^[13]. For example, an effective lesson involved students creating memes related to certain language functions or cultural context. This not only encourages linguistic creativity, but also encourages students to analyze the intricacies of language use and cultural references. The collaborative nature of creating memes also contributes to the development of communication skills, as students discuss and share their creations, providing a platform for meaningful language exchange. Students can use memes as a starting point for group discussions on scientific topics, in particular on social and cultural topics.  They can create or share memes related to a particular topic, as well as discuss the scientific concepts behind them. Meme analysis requires critical thinking skills, as students must understand the context, meaning, and underlying messages behind memes; creating memes involves developing original ideas, concepts, and visual effects that require creativity, which is a valuable skill in many aspects of life, and helps students develop teamwork and teamwork skills^[14]. 

You can also initiate a scientific intercultural debate at the seminar; organize work with the text, during which it will be necessary to compare and compare the information received, as well as find discrepancies and/or distortions in it; give each student the task to put forward his own hypothesis about solving a problem and argue his point of view using links to scientific information; to use a research project on text analysis as a tool for the formation of scientific and analytical skills, etc . At the same time, the conditions of each assignment and the studied issues should be based on the specialty that the student is studying; the work must be performed in intergroups, which will contribute to the establishment of intercultural communication, stimulate the development of communicative and scientific-analytical competencies.

Communicative and analytical games are learning technologies aimed at modeling specific scientific and communicative situations, allowing students not only to practice their theoretical knowledge, but also to develop information–analytical and analytical-interpretative skills, learn to work in an intercultural environment, as well as analyze the speech and non-verbal behavior of participants in the game.

The synthesis of the two above-mentioned methods ("trainings" and "games") provides the solution of such important tasks for the communicative adaptation of future specialists as: phonemic speech; normalization of its prosodic side; methodological and practical orientation in the field of research; development of stylistic thinking of students ^{[9, p. 5]}; creation of creative personal and (creative) motivation, as well as the formation of skills such as "problem analysis" and "making difficult decisions"; the formation of technology of ideological influence in the intercultural space.

An effective technology that contributes to the formation of scientific and analytical skills is ‘case-study’ ^{[2, p. 41]} - this is an active problem–situational analysis, which includes an empirical (thematic) research method for any field of science and an interactive teaching method based on theoretical discussion, analysis of a real or simulated situation from potentially- the professional life of a student ^[8].

Thus, ‘c ase-study’ is a practice-oriented method of organizing the educational process, which includes the use of scientific dispute skills, stimulating and motivating the processes of scientific, analytical and communicative activities, as well as a method of laboratory and practical control and self-control (situational tasks). Accordingly, this method contributes to the development of motivational-value, cognitive, activity-technological and reflexive potentials of students ^{[8, p. 24]}, and also includes such components of communicative activity as group work and information exchange.

Conclusions

1.                  One of the fundamental scientific and analytical skills relevant for the educational and research activities of students of humanities are: critical thinking, problem analysis and independent decision-making, as well as the transformation of information into knowledge.

2.                  The communicative skills of students of the designated professions can be attributed to "soft competencies" ("soft skills"), the development of which is effectively enhanced through the use of scientific and analytical work.

3. It is advisable to develop potential professional competencies through the prism of intercultural scientific communication.

4.                  Scientific-analytical and communication skills are mutually correlative, while the process of their formation will be more effective if active learning methods (role-playing games, memes, situational tasks, communicative professionally oriented trainings and active problem-situational analysis (‘case-study’) are used, which are focused on the analytical principles of educational and research work.