Abstract
Raising young professionals is one of the main goals of ESP teachers across the globe, but in today’s rapidly changing world it is complicated by the need to adapt learners to a demanding international working environment that puts heavy pressure on human resources. English communication skills are now sought by employers, so, English teachers worldwide need to help future graduates meet such high expectations. However, the practice has shown that options for improvement within national educational systems are limited. In artificially bilingual classrooms progress requires cooperation and networking of practitioners from different countries. This article presents the results of the first stage of an experimental collaborative educational project, which involved teachers and students from two state universities in Russia and Kazakhstan. It describes the beginning of implementing a relatively new pedagogical model for ESP teaching through designing a virtual crossborder learning environment simulating certain real-life professional communication situations. The aim of the paper is to analyze the initial impact of this model on developing certain soft skills and English communicative competence in the students of non-linguistic majors. The authors used the comparative analysis of data obtained through formal structured questionnaires. The statistical significance of the results was measured by the F-test and the paired Student’s t-test The results suggest that extending ESP learning environment beyond borders helps ESP teachers to shift from purely academic settings to simulating real professional scenarios, thus developing students’ English communicative competence, contributing to their professional socialization, and creating a sufficient level of stress to appeal to their motivation while avoiding discouragement.