TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT: DIALECTICS OF A FORMING PROFESSIONAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

With formats of activity shifting in many spheres, there arises a necessity of devising an educational strategy adequate to meet the needs of the new generation of professionals ready to anticipate future trends in relevant areas, create innovative matrices of activity, and adapt to emerging profession-related contexts. The situation leads the pedagogic community to prioritize the matter of a student’s development in terms of a professional. The well-established concept of developmental learning, with its focus on schoolchildren, evidently, needs reconsidering and finding a solution centered on a new actor – a student of a higher educational institution – and a system of social network different from that typical of school.

Thus, the article is devoted to substantiating a language pedagogy strategy to provide anticipating professional identity development in non-linguistics’ students. The core of the educational process is seen in the binary prognostic simulation and development of students’ competencies, and in the first place, personal qualities essential for graduates’ further self-realization in the profession and career of their motivated choice. In this context, particular emphasis is laid on the poly-perspective representation of the goal-and-contents component of non-linguists’ foreign language vocational training with direct reference to the developing professional identity, and teaching focused on providing a relevant framework for that process. The approach in question makes it possible to shift the status of professional development traditionally seen as one of professional training outcomes, and treat it, primarily, as the underlying factor of professional training and only then – as a learning outcome. The discipline “Foreign Language,” due to its specific nature, developmental potential and current status, has every opportunity and thus is to trigger off the kind of transformation outlined in the article.