Personal Meanings of Safety in the Minds of Professional Francophones

Safety, which is currently recognized as the leading condition for the organization of the educational space, remains little studied in relation to language training. Meanwhile, its representation in the minds of subjects of learning a foreign language allows us to predict the vectors of efforts to improve their activities. The aim of the study was to identify personal meanings of safety in the minds of professional francophones. The respondents were teachers and graduate students of the French language. The methods used in the study included: directed statements, content analysis and scaled survey. The study revealed the following semantic groups of the category ‘safety’ in the educational space of learning the French language: (1) the environmental parameter of the educational process; (2) the characteristics of the interaction of the subjects of the educational process (teacher and students); (3) the internal state of the subjects as a predictor of learning a foreign language; and (4) the expectation of French language proficiency. The situations of its ‘binding’ by professional francophones to the educational space of learning the French language are established, namely: the organization of the educational space; the construction of methodological approaches to teaching the language; the implementation of educational interaction; and the French language acquisition. Based on the results of the study, the significance of the category of ‘safety’ for professional francophones was confirmed in three aspects of the organization of the educational space for learning the French language, i.e., general methodological, general linguistic and private linguistic ones. In the process of teaching the French language, it seems appropriate to take into account the safety needs relevant to the modern educational space, to highlight in it the features that are significant in general for the practice of language training as a direction of pedagogical activity, as well as the nuances that are characteristic exclusively for teaching a particular language.