Adult learners' personal development by means of foreign language teaching: aims and ways of implementation

The article discusses new target priorities in teaching foreign language to adult learners within the basic principles of andragogy of development and social development approach: a new aim of foreign language learning by adults must become a new person that while learning the foreign language acquires new relationship types with the world, new personal qualities: confidence, sociability, communicability, tolerance, responsibility, emotional and cultural intelligence and permanent pursuit of self-improvement. Socially valuable human qualities must be acquired in the process of developing foreign language communicative competence in three main directions: cognitive-communicative, socio-ethical and cultural. Several main approaches to the concept of "adulthood" are discussed and based on them a new definition of an adult learner is given by the authors. By an adult learner the authors see a person reaching a certain biological, psycho-physiological, socio-personal development level which is sufficient enough to perform roles socially fixed as adult ones: a spouse, a parent, an employee, being fully responsible for the results of any activity. The article discusses psycho-intellectual traits of adults employed in the IT sphere, considering their motivation and difficulties in basic foreign language skills development. Several ways to overcome these difficulties and satisfy the foreign language learners' professional and personal motivation are proposed. Several productive educational technologies for foreign language self-learning are reviewed: electronic language portfolio, project and research technology, flipped over classroom, problem solving. The authors provide one of the possible ways to teach adult learners to self-study creating their own discussions using a template (provided by the authors) and TED viodeoconferences. The weaknesses of some language learning mobile applications are analyzed in order to create a new mobile application focused on the personal growth of adult learners in the process of a guided discussion of the personally valuable topics.

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