Didactic means, English for specific purposes, Higher education, Smart devices, Smart instruction

The feature of smartness is broadly spread in various fields of human life, including education. The main objective of the research is to prove whether the exploitation of smart didactic means significantly contributes to the process of teaching and learning. In this research, the course of English for Specific Purposes is under the focus. The smart approach to teaching and learning includes the exploitation of smart devices when using selected parts of massive open online courses, web pages, video-recordings for listening to professional topics mostly available through the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks channel, and other sources, thus covering four foreign language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), and acquiring new vocabulary and grammar. The smart didactic means were exploited within three topics of one-semester long (12 weeks) course - Academic English, Career Development, and Healthy Living. The increase in students´ knowledge and skills was considered via three didactic tests, each consisting of 24 tasks. Active answers were required in the form of writing conversations, professional documents (replies to letters, CV, presentations etc.), or translations from the mother tongue based on professional texts relating to each learning content. Three hypotheses were set to discover whether a statistically significant difference in test scores will be detected in each topic between the starting and final knowledge. The research was conducted on the sample of 119 university students, prospective teachers from the Faculty of Education and Faculty of Science. The NCSS 2020 statistic software was used for data processing. The test results showed statistically significant increase in all three topics. This result entitles us to exploit the smart approach to teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes at the higher education level.