Self-directed learning through creative activity of students

Teaching a foreign language is associated with the development of thinking, emotions and other areas of the personality. The importance and the need to include motivational and emotional spheres of the individual student in the study of a foreign language are stressed in the article. Self-directed learning means various types of individual and group activity of students that they have undertaken in the classroom and extracurricular activities at home without the direct participation of the teacher. The authors discuss the problem of independent work skills development of students learning a foreign language, assert that the effect of independent work is possible only when it is implemented in the educational process as a whole system that runs through all stages of foreign language teaching, and pay special attention to the tasks that students develop themselves. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.