FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: A COMMUNICATIVE AND COGNITIVE PARADIGM

The study deals with a modern strategy of a foreign language (FL) acquisition. It briefly outlines the process of learning a FL within the framework of the communicative and cognitive approach. Developing learners' communicative and cognitive competence is identified as a current target. In order to achieve it, the teaching process has to be grounded on the following basic principles: the first one accentuates the importance of acquiring a FL via cognitive and communicative activity; the second one highlights the indication to employ learners' epistemological styles in the educational process; the third one postulates the premise that the process of a FL acquisition fosters the development of students' linguistic personalities; the fourth one emphasizes the assumption that a FL acquisition conduces and facilitates shaping learners' worldviews; the fifth principle accentuates the relevance of widening learners' knowledge space. The key aspect of the paper is an experimentally proved spiral model of cognition, which signifies that in the course of mastering a FL students move from perception of the material to speech production through such stages as reproduction, apperception, knowledge incubation and creative reproduction. In the process of passing through the singled out stages learners develop communicative and cognitive capacities and acquire relevant knowledge, habits and skills that constitute alien communicative and cognitive competence.