The rapid development of modern society makes ever greater demands to the level of language skills in the professional sphere. The future professional should be prepared to navigate in any problem situation of professional communication, to find quickly the most rational way out.
It is obvious that traditional teaching is no longer able to provide the students with necessary knowledge in solving the problem. Due to this there was the need to include modern educational technologies in the educational process.
The term "learning technology" is widely used since the 60s of the 20th century to refer to the set of methods of teacher’s work, through which the effective achievement of the lesson learning objectives is ensured in the shortest period of time.
The most important criteria to learning technologies are:
Performance (a high level of achievement of the goal of teaching)
Cost (mastering a large amount of educational material per unit of time)
Ergonomics (no overload and overwork, training in an atmosphere of cooperation and positive emotional climate)
High motivation of students to study the subject.
Most researchers consider learning technology as one of the ways to implement student-active approach to learning process due to which students act as active and creative subjects of educational activity. In the methodology of teaching foreign languages modern learning technologies include following: cooperative learning, project technology, gaming technology, distance learning, information and audio-visual technology as well as "case study" technology.
Let us consider "case study" technology in more detail. From the history of this method it is known, that it was first used in the United States in the Harvard Business School. In 1910, Dean of Harvard Business School advised teachers to apply discussions of specific managerial situations as a supplementary mean to the lectures. Since that they began inviting directors of companies and organizations to lessons who "presented" the problem and in the process of discussion students tried to find a solution. The first textbook on writing situational exercises was published by Dr. Copeland in 1921.
