DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES AS A RESOURCE FOR DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS OF ECOLOGY STUDENTS: A THREE-TIER TOOL TAXONOMY

The professionalisation of higher education in Uzbekistan and comparable contexts has shifted the object of foreign language instruction from general communicative competence towards professional speech competence — the capacity to perform, in English, the oral communicative tasks that constitute a specialist's working life. For students of ecology and environmental science this means briefing a field team, defending the findings of an environmental impact assessment, explaining a sampling protocol, mediating between scientific data and a non-expert audience at a public hearing, and negotiating within international environmental projects. Traditional ESP classrooms, constrained by contact hours and by the near-absence of authentic professional interlocutors, offer each student only a few minutes of genuine speaking time per session. Digital educational technologies are frequently proposed as the remedy, yet the literature tends to catalogue applications rather than to explain which pedagogical function a given technology serves. This paper argues that digital tools acquire methodological value only when they are classified by the didactic function they perform in the cycle of speech skill formation, and it proposes a three-tier taxonomy to that end.