NURTURING STUDENTS' CREATIVITY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION IN LINGUISTICS MAJOR

The article gives an insight into the developing of future translators' and interpreters' linguistic competence via creative language learning. The authors present their findings on introducing works of literature and the arts, creative assignments and opinion essays into the academic process of professional linguists' training. The research is based on the interdisciplinary approach - it combines the issues of education, methods of teaching, linguistics, literature and culture studies. Following the ideas of Russian and international researchers in the field, the authors view creative approach as a combination of four main factors: creative process, creative product, creative personality and creative environment. The creative process involves the creation of emotionally safe atmosphere, which allows to carry out creative projects, contributes to the development of intellectual, emotional and verbal activity of students, develop initiative and independence. Therefore, it is important for the teacher to nurture the creative personality within a special creative environment where students come to class eager to explore and discover making shared creative efforts. This may not only improve future translators' and interpreters' linguistic competence but promote their creative personality, enabling them to go beyond what is known, to make non-standard decisions and engage in activities characterized by novelty. The research data accumulated by means of traditional methods of observation, product analysis and questionnaire allow the authors to come to a number of conclusions. The most valuable of them is that linguistic academic subjects have an outstanding potential to provide for the creativity of students, which in its turn promotes multi-sided development of their personalities and motivation for further study. Creative thinking via analyzing, comparing and contrasting, predicting, hypothesizing and reasoning as well as enquiry and evaluation skills is achieved alongside improving students' language skills in creative kinds of activities. Writing tasks give opportunities to express opinions, share experience and refer to examples. Presentations with slideshows and oral essays reflect the students' interests and preferences from choosing the topic to the methods of its representing. Besides, gaining skills of public speaking is a necessary tool for a future interpreter. Creative approach to the foreign language instruction in Linguistics is realised with the help of various forms of work: classroom activities, distant language education, students' independent projects. Combination of forms and methods is necessary for training a competent specialist in translation and interpretation studies. The authors' views are supported unreservedly by the information obtained via the students' opinion survey on their attitude to creative assignments, opportunity to choose a preferable task or topic, introduction of extralinguistic content into the academic curriculum.