Abstract:

The transformation of higher education actualises the need to ensure the variability of the educational process, enrich the content of education programmes, deepen interdisciplinary links, versatile personal development of future specialists and ensure their socialisation in the information space of a multicultural society. The general trend of higher education transformation is its diversification, which ensures the multidimensional development of the education system and its components. The diversification approach provides favourable conditions for training a person with wide-ranging knowledge and competencies to realise the goals of school education.
One goal of school education is to create conditions for the upbringing of a harmoniously developed and socially responsible personality based on the spiritual and moral values of the peoples of the Russian Federation and historical, national and cultural traditions. Training pre-service foreign language teachers to implement the regional component of school education is an integral part of the diversification of the professional-pedagogical training of future teachers. Foreign language teachers should have not only the knowledge of the language system and culture of the target-language countries, professional and pedagogical skills. They also should know the history, geography, the modern political, economic and social life of Russia and the native region to organise intercultural interaction.
The study attempts to prove that the regional component in curriculum diversification of pre-service foreign language teachers’ training makes a contribution to the development of foreign language communicative competence, the components of which are linguistic, discursive, socio-cultural and regional competences. The authors propose ways of implementing regional component in the educational process and prove that the field of study “Pedagogical Education” speciality “English Language. Foreign Language” has the potential to introduce ways of developing the regional competence. First-year students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages may be exposed to materials revealing the characteristics and peculiarities of their own country and region along with those of the target-language countries, making it possible to conduct the teaching and learning process in the context of the dialogue of cultures. These can be materials about geographical, political, historical, social, cultural, linguistic and other peculiarities that foreign language teacher candidates can incorporate in their future teaching.

Keywords:

Diversification of pre-service teachers’ training, foreign language teachers, regional component, regional competence, second language teaching, foreign language education.