ON THE INFLUENCE OF HIGHER LANGUAGE EDUCATION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL MATURITY AMONG STUDENTS OF TEACHER-TRAINING UNIVERSITIES

Despite the many interpretations of the concept of education, existing both in the synchronic and the diachronic plane, it seems possible to identify that invariant basis that incorporates the theoretical views of most authors and which consists in the possibility of describing this concept as a process of transferring knowledge and experience from generation to generation. Moreover, education appears to be the result of a purposeful, organized and systematically planned assimilation by a person of many elements of the objectified experience of mankind, which is systemic and recognized by society as a certain level of academic or professional training of an individual.The purpose of this article is to identify the specifics of language education in correlation with psychological maturity phenomenon within the paradigm of teaching foreign languages to students of linguistic faculties. We resorted to the content analysis method, the project method, the portfolio method, and the "I-metaphor" method (A. G. Zhilyaev, M. V. Bogdanova, O. A. Kolotovkina), the use of which, as shown by our experiment, is also plausible for determining the degree of psychological maturity of teacher-training universities’ students. Education serves as an optimal and intensive way for a person to enter the world of culture and science, the world of cultural values and spiritual goals for the development of society, and also in some cases education determines cultural and psychological-cognitive transformations both in an individual and in the communicative community as a whole. Language education in higher institutions, as the experience of many years of our practical work at the university shows, has long secured the status of linguocultural education, since the result of the latter is the multilingualism of students who are aware of their belonging not only to the culture of their native language, but also to the foreign language studied at the university, and in a broader perspective, it becomes a link in a more complex process of adaptation and familiarization with the world multicultural and multilingual space, in the ability to adequately identify oneself in the world multicultural environment in the sphere of communication and professional functioning. As a result of the study, we found it productive to apply markers of psychological maturity of students of linguistics for determining the degree of formed ability to overcome barriers in professional activity and within the domestic framework. Among the results of conducted empirical research (217 students of Southern Federal University (Russia) became the respondents) we should emphasize high efficiency of such markers of psychological maturity as the ability of self-search and reflection, development of critical thinking, the presence of standpoint on the issues of axiological and ontological nature, the presence of adequate self-esteem, the ability to self-development, setting goals and finding ways to achieve them, tolerance to one's own and others' mistakes. Depending on the degree of representation of these markers in the "psychological portrait" of linguistic students, it becomes possible to state the level character of the phenomenon of psychological maturity in students, which is directly predetermined by the duration of training period and the success of mastering the language program and University curriculum in general.