THE CHARACTERISTICS OF PROBLEM AND PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AT A UNIVERSITY

The formation of the necessary motivation and competencies that will allow graduates to successfully immerse themselves in the intensive and constantly updated flow of foreign scientific, technical and public information is an important problem in teaching foreign languages at universities in the context of a universal global intellectual space. The requirements for the quality of professional training of students of non-linguistic specialties provide, among other things, the renewal of the former and the creation of new linguistic teaching techniques. One of the promising projects in this direction is the teaching of a foreign language basing on problem and project-based learning. Its basis is the development of students' cognitive skills, the ability to independently construct their knowledge, orient themselves in the information space, and develop critical and creative thinking. The main purpose of the method is to provide students with the opportunity to independently acquire knowledge in the process of solving practical problems or problems that require the integration of knowledge from various subject areas. Considering the existing pedagogical realities, the application of this complex teaching method in the modern sociocultural environment gives grounds to characterize it as a new technology, naturally creative. Its features make it possible to individualize the educational process, effectively solve student-centered problems, enable the students to reveal their potential, to show greater independence in planning and organizing their activities. The purpose of the article is to reveal the genesis and analyze the distinctive features the problem and project-based learning, in comparison with other student-centered teaching methods conducted in an interactive mode, clarify the background and formulate the organizational and pedagogical framework for the application of this educational program. The methodological basis of the research is the system-structural approach, the categories and concepts of cognitive linguistics; the authors used the comparative analysis, the expert evaluation method and other comparative methods.