Major approaches to teaching a foreign language to humanities-based students in the context of cultivating the subject component of their professional development

Amid the radical changes taking place in the sphere of higher professional education, what is having increasingly greater value today is the professional and personal development of the nation's future workforce. Changes taking place in many areas of society are bringing about new requirements for college graduates, with an increasingly greater focus being given to the subject component of their professional development. Thus, there is relevance in exploring various approaches to cultivating a modern model of personality during the process of professional education. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare some of the major approaches to teaching a foreign language in the context of cultivating students' subject position. The authors focus on 2 specific approaches to teaching a foreign language: communicative and linguoculturological. The study's findings help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, leading to the conclusion that in seeking to achieve the objectives of cultivating students' subject position by means of a foreign language it is hardly possible to go with one particular approach. In the authors' view, the most efficient approach is to make harmonious use of certain elements of each of the approaches in a selective or integrated fashion - depending on the situation. © 2017.