Abstract:

The article focuses on updating the system of teaching foreign languages to meet the current social demand and accommodate the relevant change in the goals and objectives of higher professional education. Proceeding from the assumption that a transition to post industrial society and knowledge economy imposes specific requirements upon an expert’s qualifications and competencies, it highlights the major factors being the driving force of the current change, such as high risks, uncertainty, increased competition, advanced technologies and the unprecedented value of information and communication.

It means that education is becoming more and more oriented towards creativity, self-expression and self-actualization, which are all incorporated in the concept of innovativeness. The article goes on to lay out the requirements an innovative person has to be up to in order to successfully deal with multifaceted challenges of the innovation economy. It gives a summary of ways an innovative personality could be defined, from an ability to identify opportunities and turn them into reality to a phenomenon of overadaptive nature. This is further expanded to include a list of indicators and personality traits associated with innovativeness.

The article looks into the concept and structure of the innovative capacity of a professional as a systemic integral characteristic of a person’s ability for professional growth and fulfillment. This perspective is taken to outline a methodology for developing and expanding a professional’s innovative capacity in the foreign language course and suggest specific activities designed to achieve this goal. Among other core elements of such activities, uncertainty and deliberate lack of input information seem to trigger “outside the box” thinking and necessitate innovative behaviour. It allows for the conclusion that the foreign language component of curriculum at non-linguistic universities has a lot of potential to this end.

Keywords:

Innovative capacity of a professional, personal innovative capacity, innovative personality, activity-related self-identification, postindustrial society, teaching method, foreign language education (FLE) system, non-linguistic universities.