COMMUNICATIVE AND COGNITIVE COMPETENCE OF FUTURE PHILOLOGISTS AND TEACHER-TRAINEES

Abstract

This paper is aimed at elucidating the specific features of the communicative and cognitive competence among University students who major in linguistic fields and foreign language Pedagogy as well as the conditions for its advancing. Specifically, it propounds a new methodological framework of foreign language acquisition within a communicative and cognitive activity targeted at fostering a corresponding competence as a final learning outcome of University studies. The communicative and cognitive competence is defined as an acquired ability to effectively perform speech and mental activity while solving genuine and ideational issues using a target language.

This complex ability provides students’ willingness for self-actualization and readiness for successful performance in a variety of future professional activities. Such readiness is constituted by developed critical thinking, cognitive and linguistic personality and multiple intelligences, formed knowledge space and the ability to conceptualize input. The author introduces the communicative and cognitive approach to foreign language teaching and learning, which is based on the principles that accentuate the necessity to develop both communicative and cognitive habits, skills and capacities reflected in relevant competences of cognizing subjects.

Furthermore, in the focus of attention are also the factors conducive to enhancing communicative and cognitive competence (such as heredity and environment). Besides, the emphasis is placed on the role of students’ creative manifestations in a foreign language course (determined by intelligence, current scope of knowledge, thinking abilities, learning and cognitive styles, individual characteristics, motivation and learning environment), human abilities that contribute to promoting the sought-for competence (synthetic, analytical, practical, communicative, cognitive, and regulatory), the significance of different emotional states that might have an impact on the communicative and cognitive development of an individual. A particular prominence is given to the role of the affective filter, which is capable of regulating the volume of incoming information and, accordingly, influencing the rate and quality of its processing and assimilation.

The article also identifies and interprets the constituents of the communicative and cognitive competence (professional, socio-psychological, general cultural, communicative, cognitive) and specifies their relationship and correlation in the process of mastering a foreign language.