Детальная информация

This study investigates the development of written business communication skills in linguistics students through the use of a digital learning tool. The relevance of the research is determined by the growing demands of the labour market for graduates who can effectively handle professional correspondence in English, alongside the in- sufficient attention paid to formality and politeness in standard teaching materials. The aim of the study was to design, implement and evaluate an online supplementary course entitled “Formality and Politeness in Business Letters”. The course was developed on the Stepik platform and integrated principles from genre‐based and formal‐structural approaches to teaching writing. A pedagogical experiment was conducted with 24 stu- dents from two linguistics programmes at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. The results showed significant progress in both groups: mean scores in- creased by 29.7% and 31.3% respectively. Student reflections also positively assessed the usefulness of the course. The findings suggest that supplementing a standard busi- ness writing course with targeted digital materials focused on formality and politeness is pedagogically sound and can be recommended for use in higher education language programmes.