Developing Research Competence of Teachers as a Way of Increasing Competitiveness of HEIs in Kazakhstan

The present article shows the ndings of a basic quantitative research of the teachers’ research competence and its inuence on higher educational institutions’ (hereafter: HEI) competitiveness on the sample of Kazakh University of International Relations &World Languages after Ablaikhan (hereafter: KazUIR&WL). Using the method of questionnaire, the study investigates the level of satisfaction of the students and parents with the education quality in KazUIR&WL, their needs and expectations, as well as shows the linkage between teachers’ research competence and the quality of education. The research involves 19 teachers, 70 students and 70 parents, who present their opinions by answering both open-ended and close-ended questions. The present research is inductive non-experimental and helps build a strong theoretical platform for generating further research questions. The main purpose of the research is mostly an assessment of the current situation in teaching English in Kazakhstan, with elements of evaluation and description. In this aspect, the current study can become a good scientic background for generating further research ideas in the sphere of education, linguistics, methodology, history, foreign culture studies and others. The method used in the present research is the method of questioning.

The collection's preface was written by the famous historian-archivist M. Zh. Hasanal, who pointed out the following: "The universality of language as a communication and its national characteristics make it a unique phenomenon in human history. The history of each language is inseparable from the history of those who own it. The formation of a uni ed national language and the status of the country and prosperity is closely related, and any change related to its development or the dynamics of the decline of the country can only affect the state of language. (Hasanal, 2010, p. 6). These ideas are offered by some of the Kazakhstani scientists and methodologists. As it has been mentioned by Kunanbayeva (2005), modern education system should be oriented to the learners' individual willingness to look for knowledge, rather than to get them in the full and completed form transmitted by the teacher during the class, as well as being taught alongside with the culture of a target country. In accordance with this idea, it becomes possible to say that education becomes more effective, as well as rational and practical, and will be more creative and productive.
So, what is really essential for a modern foreign language teaching? To answer this question, we need to understand the key features that characterize directly the system of foreign language education. The speci city of foreign language education is obvious due to a number of factors that Gal'skova (2003) de ned as follows: socio-economic and political factors, socio-educational, socio-cultural, methodological, and individual factors. Today the personality with the ability to actively engage in communication in a foreign language, owning the knowledge of both native and target cultures, and who is therefore capable of culturally sensitive partners in dialogue is highly demanded. In other words, modern teachers need to own intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, the model of professional competences of a modern teacher at university level can be presented as follows: Professionally-identifying competence, which include theoretical and predictive, re exive and professionally-developing subcompetences; International communicative competence (hereafter: ICC) with its communicative, interpretative, contextual, modeling and creativitydeveloping subcompetences; Research competence, which implies searching, analytical, creative, modeling, diagnostic, experimental and metalinguistic subcompetences (Fig. 1).
According to Badley and Habeshow (1991), in the process of technological development, the role of a teacher is transferred to a 'manager of the classroom'. As a manager of learning the HE teacher will have to be a exible, general educator, committed to a multi-discipline approach to learning, to lifelong education and training both for himself and for those who will rely upon his guidance for their learning (Badley & Habeshow, 1991).
Thus, we can see that the role and the functions of a teacher in HE have been changed and modi ed in accordance with the new standards and demands of the society.

The ways of increasing competitiveness of HEIs
Today, living in the world of marketing, we cannot deny its in uence on every sphere of our life, including education. Universities, as educational institutions, play a vital role in the development and improvement of the society, contributing to the welfare of citizens. Considering the social responsibility of universities with a large number of stakeholders (students, institutions, government, employees, companies, local community, etc.), university in its daily management is also considered a corporate entity, which set up strategic plans and practices, an essential process to achieve its success in the long term. (Ramos, Llinás-Audet & Barrena Martinez, 2017).
One of the reasons for that is the rapid leap in the number of private sector universities and its dominance over the public sector. Here we see that the role of 'students' also changes to 'clients', who pay money and want a result -that is knowledge. Thus, HEIs have to compete with each other in order to attract more potential customers.
When a university seeks to be competitive, it needs to rethink whether its activities meet the needs of its stakeholders and perhaps need to build stronger strategic relationships with its stakeholders to respond to changes in the education sector (Dima, Vasilache, Ghinea & Agoston, 2013).
Of course there is a bunch of ways of increasing popularity of a company, and the rst thing that we can think of is advertising.
According to the article written by Kazakhstani scholars Sayanbek and Serikbekuly, there are four main directions of increasing a university competitiveness: The creation and maintenance of university website Advertising on the Internet Posting information about the services of an educational organization on industry portals University blogging (Sayabek, Ziyadin & Serikbekuly, Askhat, 2020).
The major challenges in higher education today are: decreasing quality due to inadequate models of teaching process evaluation, inadequate application of existing quality control mechanism, favorization of general education, devaluation of liberal model of education, plethora of information and fragmentation of knowledge, commercialization of scienti c projects, etc. (Gajić, 2010, p.44-46). All these challenges put increasing pressure on traditional universities and at the same time create favorable environment for transformation of higher education institutions form faculty-centered into market-driven organizations. From this fact arises the need for application of marketing concept in higher education institutions (Leko-Šimić & Štimac, 2012).
So, the root of the issue is -the quality of education. Where there is education of a high level -there are clients (students). If we think of the quality of education, many students and parents would say -it's a mainly the quality of teaching. The corporate model affects the administrative structure of the college as well as what takes place in the classroom (Polet, 2018).
Bene ciaries of the education service are constantly testing and evaluation its quality. It can be said that the higher level of development put stricter rules and expectations on education service quality (Funda, 2008, p.9,13). Besides, economic and cultural globalization has created new challenges for the higher education system since it requires global openness and knowledge exchange since the labor market is increasingly becoming liberalized (Leko-Šimić & Štimac, 2012).
Thus, in order to improve educational quality, we must pay attention to teaching staff and develop their teaching abilities. Universities of Kazakhstan should invest into their teachers by organizing professional training, seminars and lectures for free or at the low cost. One of the characteristics of a professional teacher in university level -is a developed research ability.
It goes without saying that universities with recognizable names and good reputation are more likely to be highly competitive. According to BBC news, another important factor of increasing competitiveness is "citations per faculty", which focuses on the level of research in universities, calculated in terms of the number of times research work is cited by other researchers (BBC News, 2014).
Thus, we can consider teaching quality as a direct factor affecting the quality of education and, hence, one of the way of improving the competitiveness of a HEI.

Research in the sphere of teaching
Research competence is the basis for the development of intellectual, communicative, design skills, develops critical thinking, creative abilities of the teacher. Teachers are researchers. They collect enormous amounts of data each day, and they rapidly evaluate and make decisions based on this data. Some of this work is numerical, but much is qualitative. Teachers may be second only to doctors in doing this. What teachers are not good at is doing anything formal with this data (Whitman & Kelleher, 2017).
Nowadays, in Kazakhstan in the sphere of higher education we can roughly talk about two types of teachers: academicians and practicians. If academicians mainly deal with theoretical disciplines and their professional activity is automatically linked to conducting research, then with practicians it seems quite dissimilar. Teachers of practical disciplines, such as language teachers or methodology teachers, should understand that for them the purpose of doing research differs from those of theoretical disciplines teachers.
According to Hairon, "The objective in academic research is to produce new knowledge but for most teachers doing research, the purpose is to improve practice while being informed by theory at the same time. When they do literature review, they don't have to be exhaustive. The purpose is to look for literature that pertains speci cally to the classroom teaching strategy that they wish to try or explore (Hairon, 2020)." In addition, the research competence of a University Teacher should be understood as a set of knowledge and skills necessary for the implementation of research activities. Research competence should be attributed to the key competencies of the teacher, since its presence is crucial for professional pedagogical activity, the development of pedagogical skills and professionalism. Research knowledge and skills it is one of the most striking characteristics of the level of professional maturity of a teacher.
If to talk about teachers-practicians and the role of research in their professional activity, it should be noted that the research competence is directly related to the effectiveness of teaching the university level. In the market of educational services, one of the main conditions for ensuring the competitiveness of higher education institutions is the level of professional competence of a University Teacher, which determines the quality of training of future specialists. In a highly competitive environment, higher education is implementing innovative educational technologies designed for competent teachers, whose development is hindered by the presence of certain problems. The research position, according to Obuhov A.S., it is not only that which is actualized in the situation of uncertainty, but also the position, on the basis of which a person needs to get into these situations, to nd them; And after nding a situation that requires research activity -to pass the main stages of the study in succession. (Obuhov, 2006, p. 6).
Summarizing various approaches to de ning the essence of research competence, we note that there is no unambiguous interpretation of this concept. On the one hand, research competence should be considered as a component of professional competence, on the other -as an integral component of general and professional education. Therefore, research competence is an important tool for a university teacher and can be considered as the structural unit of his mental activity (Slastenin, 2002). The following signs of the teacher-researcher can be distinguished as follows: ability to observe, analyze and explain observational data, to separate signi cant facts from non-essential; ability to conduct an experiment (staging, explanation and presentation of the results); ability to carry out an active search at its individual stages; understanding of the structure of theoretical knowledge; mastery of general scienti c ideas and principles; ability to highlight the main thing in complex natural phenomena, abstract, analyze and generalize the material; knowledge of the methods of scienti c knowledge; ability to consider phenomena and processes in correlation, to reveal the essence of objects and phenomena, to see their contradictions.
On the basis of the mentioned above characteristics of a teacher-researcher, it seems logicalto de ne the abilities (or sub-competences) which all together can form Research Competence of a Teacher as follows: 1. Ability to analyze the current situation in education Reviewing the available literature -here we take, receive and process the information from different types of sources, like scienti c articles, theses written by others, websites of different sorts and others.
2. Ability to de ne gaps and problems to be researched Identi cation of the problem -is the initial stage of any research. It suggests nding a contradiction (or a problem) which prevents the development of the process. This problem can be discovered after having the practical experience in the eld or gaining some theoretical information. For example, scholars who have been teaching English for a certain period of time, may realize at one stage that something is not working anymore or some methods are more or less effective etc. Or they may feel that the nal teaching result (university graduates and their skills) does not fully match the society needs. Thus, it leads to a contradictory situation. As the result, the scholars may need to nd a proper solution to this problem or the contradiction. And here we come to emphasizing the hypothesis. Formulating a question -a stage when we should come up with a question or a 'gap' in the topic of research which demands our careful exploration.
3. Ability to set aims and objectives -generating the main goal of the work and research questions, de ning your expectations and outcomes.
4. Research methods acquisition -Selecting an appropriate research design; 5. Critical thinking ability -Interpretation of ndings -in accordance with what you knew from different sources mentioned above, a scholar, who is in charge with the research, must try to formulate a personal vision and understanding of the existing problem, as well as come up with some possible solution or solutions to it.
6. Ability to use IT in the classroom -which helps to make a lesson more innovative and effective 7. Creative ability -allows to diverse classes by trying new teaching methods and techniques and involves more students into learning process.
Researching teachers create school and classroom environments in which there are researching students. Students and teacher work together to ask (not just answer) questions, and to pose (not just solve) problems. By becoming question-askers and problem-posers, students and teachers work together to construct curriculum from their context and lived experiences, rather than just receive preselected and predigested information that will appear on a test. And in working to construct meaningful curriculum together, you and your students engage in professional development and classroom learning activity that offers hope for the future in these trying education times (Watson, 2013). In this way, we cannot deny the importance of research in the teaching process.

Conducting research as one of the functions of a teacher at university level
In the market of educational services, one of the main conditions for ensuring the competitiveness of higher education institutions is the level of professional competence of the University teacher, which determines the quality of training of future specialists (Kunanbayeva, 2005).
In a general sense, research competence refers to the ability of a specialist in a particular eld to successfully solve the tasks of professional activity according to set standards. Competence is what a specialist has achieved. The components of a specialist's research competence are knowledge, skills, and professionally signi cant personal qualities that together ensure their ability to successfully perform their work (Kunanbayeva, 2005).

Kunanbayeva (2010) suggests seven key elements of the Research Competence of a teacher:
Searching -allows to look for and select a su cient information for a certain topic; Analytical -shows a teacher's ability to select and analyze information, in order to choose the needed one; Creative -demonstrates the ways a teacher uses to make the lesson more diverse and full of different techniques and activities; Modeling -helps to formulate a topic, a problem, objectives and goals; Diagnostic -explores gaps and shortages in a certain sphere; Experimental -tastes a hypothesis in practice (classroom); Metalinguistic -shows a teacher's scienti c speech-craft.
Thus, we can draw a linkage between the above-mentioned elements and the sub-competences of Research competence suggested by us (Fig. 2).

Teaching quality as a way to increase competitiveness of a university
Since traditionally universities have conceived their task as limited to the elaboration and transfer of disciplinary knowledge, it is not surprising that many academics are not used to considering the issues of teaching/learning methods and are not familiar with (or even di dent towards) the vocabulary and the conceptual framework used to describe and classify those methods" (Požarnik, Barica, 2009). The quality of teaching connected to the competencies of teaching staff is slowly getting its place among quality criteria (Požarnik, Barica, 2009).
The present study is considered inductive, since it derives a general result from a concrete element. In our case, it is 'Research competence of a teacher' as a concrete element, which can result in general improvement of a HEI's competitiveness.
In this way, we can assume that the development of research competence of a teacher is one of the possible ways of increasing the level of competitiveness of a university (Fig. 3).
Based on the suggestions given by Sayanbek & Serikbekuly (2020) and Gajić, (2010), we can conclude that nowadays there are two main vectors on increasing the competitiveness of a university: To provide su cient information to potential customers To increase teaching quality by changing and correction of the models of teaching (Fig. 4).

Research Design
Kazakh University of International Relations and World Languages after Ablaikhan (KazUIR&WL) is a private sector university and one of the biggest organizations in Kazakhstan. Since it has recently turned to private sector, it now aims to attract more students and increase its reputation. Thus, the survey is designed to get the opinions of three stakeholders of the university as a corporation -students, teachers and parents, in order to check their satisfaction with the quality of education. The data is mainly quantitative, non-experimental and descriptive in nature, however, to check the research competence of teachers, I use open-ended questions. After collecting the data, all the information will be measured and converted to numerical system.

Population of the survey
The participants of the survey are students of the 1 and 2 academic year with the major "International Relations", teachers of English and lecturers in Sociology and History of language, as well as parents. The data will be analyzed with Excel and Z-test.
In order to check the ability of teachers of KazUIR&WL of conducting research, the questionnaire has been created (VanGundy, 2005). The questionnaire is composed of 20 questions on research topic, which are aimed at checking the above-mentioned 7 abilities of teachers (Crystal, 2006).
The research covered the following population: 1. 160 students of the 1 and 2 academic year with the major "International Relations" of KazUIR&WL; 2. 20 teachers of English and lecturers in Sociology and History of language from the Basic Department of International Relations; 3. 100 parents.

Sampling of the study
Based on the modi ed formula suggested by Cochran (1963), we calculated the following sample size: to the population of 160 students, the sample size is 113; to the population of 20 teachers, the sample size is 19; to the population of 100 parents, the sample size is 79. Thus, we operated the following information: 1. 113 students of the 1 and 2 academic year with the major "International Relations" of KazUIR&WL (70%); 2. 19 teachers of English and lecturers in Sociology and History of language from the Basic Department of International Relations (95%); 3. 79 parents (79%) ( Table 1).

Analysis and interpretation of data
The data collected through the method of survey, which was composed of 10 close-ended questions for students and parents and 20 open-ended questions for teachers. The data was carefully collected and analyzed with Z-test, and later on all the numerical data was calculated and presented in tables.
There were two types of survey: one was composed of 10 closed-ended questions and was offered to answer by students and their parents. The questions were mainly aimed at checking the level of satisfaction of students and parents with the present situation in education, as well as nding out their needs and preferences as customers. The second survey consisted of 20 open-ended questions and was distributed to teachers (lecturers and practitioners), and was mainly directed to characterize the level of research competence development of teachers on the sample of KazUIR&WL. The survey highlighted such points as teachers' ability to analyze the current situation in education, their ability to set aims and objectives and awareness of research methods.

The results of the rst survey
After careful data analysis, the results of the both surveys were calculated. Altogether, 70 students and 70 parents took part in the survey. There were 10 closeended questions, which aimed at four main directions: university's reputation, teaching quality, administration work and learning opportunities (National ranking of the best universities of Kazakhstan, 2020).
According to the results, it can be noted that a half of the students and more than 40% of parents see teaching quality as the main part of a successful and competitive university (Table 2). observational data, to separate signi cant facts from non-essential, ability to conduct an experiment, ability to carry out an active search at its individual stages, understanding of the structure of theoretical knowledge, mastery of general scienti c ideas and principles, ability to highlight the main thing in complex natural phenomena, abstract, analyze and generalize the material, knowledge of the methods of scienti c knowledge, the ability to consider phenomena and processes in correlation, to reveal the essence of objects and phenomena, to see their contradictions (Slastenin, 2002).
Research can be used to inform the design and structure of teacher education programmes; Teachers and teacher educators can be equipped to engage with and be discerning consumers of research; Teachers and teacher educators may be equipped to conduct their own research, individually and collectively, to investigate the impact of particular interventions or to explore the positive and negative effects of educational practice (British Educational Research Association, 2014).
At rst sight, it can seem confusing or misleading that talking about teaching competences, we mention research competence. Because the concept of research is usually associated with science and scholars, but not English language teachers. But the present research clearly shows us that research competence is very important for a teacher, especially at university level. It helps teachers grow professionally; work on their skills and competencies, as well as to stay up-to-date within the world of educations.
In this way, the following recommendations can be suggested: 1. to identify the strategic plan of increasing the competitiveness of a HEI by paying attention to the quality of teaching; 2. to facilitate parents and students of HEIs with high education quality by the constant monitoring of their needs and adapting them to the teaching process; 3. to increase teachers' motivation to conduct research by encouraging and rewarding with bonuses and certi cates, which could help in developing a successful career; 4. to organize in-university professional trainings for teachers who are interested in research, explaining them more on the peculiarities and bene ts of doing research in teaching; 5. to strengthen the material and technical base of a HEI; 6. to improve various forms of professional development of teachers 7. to activate innovative processes in education in a HEI;

Conclusion
As it can clearly be noticed, today, educational quality is one of the keys to improve a HEI's competitiveness. The present study's results have shown that students of KazUIR&WL and their parents understand educational quality almost from the same perspective, with a slight difference in two aspects: university's reputation (none of the students considers this aspect crucial, while 11% of parents think it's important) and administration work (for students it seems to be more important that for their parents). At the same time, most of the responders consider high teaching quality as an important indicator of a successful university. Whereas, the survey among the teachers of KazuIR&WL has shown that most of the responders are quite familiar with the theory of conducting a research, but rather struggle with its implementation in real life.