Application of andragogy principles in teaching foreign language (using English as the example)

Developing methods and ways of teaching for adult learners is one of the main tasks in modern higher educational institutions and extended educational systems, because a specialist of the modern progressive society must be not only a professional in his field and possess a number of skills and abilities necessary for work, but be proficient in one or more foreign languages. However, in ourexperience many specialists neither speak a foreign language at all, nor know it at a high enough level to run professional operations in a foreign language, whether it is negotiating or writing a business letter. For this reason, this article analyses the works of many scientists studying the problems of andragogy, ascience dealing with the specificities of adult education. Not only main negative psychological factors, interfering the effectiveness of foreign language learning byadults, are identified but also positive ones, among which there is a high degree of motivation and the ability to independently control their learning process, evaluate learning results. A teacher plays an important role in a learning process, whose main task is to plan a course so that adult learners can achieve by the end their goals and can apply their knowledge in practice. Therefore, variouscommunicative methods in teaching adult learners are used to develop speaking,reading, listening and writing skills, as well as to form a number of competenciesnecessary for professional activities and process of communication in a foreignlanguage. The main objective of this article is to find the effective ways, methodsand strategies in teaching adult learners. The relevance of the study is explainedby the need of specialists with a foreign language knowledge in the modern labormarket; hence, a language learning by adults is highly demanded.