French as a Second/Third Foreign Language in the Context of Multilingual Competence of Philology Students

Abstract

Over the last decades one can observe extensive research on the theory of second or third foreign language teach-ing. Many works are dedicated to foreign language teaching based on the languages of national groups or teaching two foreign languages through their sequential acquisition or simultaneous learning the languages of the same language group. The aim of the article is to analyse the main methods of teaching a second/third foreign language, to specify their general theoretical and practical value in the processes of the development of multilingual competence of philolo-gy students. The factors of second language teaching such as the typological comparison of language phenomena; the phonetic, grammar, lexical, syntactic, semantic, morphological transferences were taken into account. The role of the latest methodical practices, such the Internet as an instrument for the organisation of distance learning was highlight-ed. The experience of foreign language teaching, in particular French, shows that the process of a second foreign lan-guage acquisition is a multiaspectual phenomenon which consists of many interrelated factors: linguistic, psychologi-cal, sociological and others. The efficiency of foreign language learning depends on the combination of the following factors: the effectiveness of principal methods of teaching, an adequate assessment of the target audience and its re-quirements for language acquisition, positive psychological mood, students’ motivation. Multilingual education results in achieving basic multilingual competence that allows to consider both the alternative way of learning the language and the way to get specific knowledge, to join the values of the world culture and to develop social communicative abili-ties of a personality.