The Future of Education

In the past half-century, the main principle of teaching languages—first and foremost, foreign languages (FLT)—has become the communicative approach. Expanding the limits of interpersonal and intercultural communication has become the unquestionable priority of foreign language learning, which has sidelined, to say the least, the linguistic component in FLT. Furthermore, that “expansion” boils down to learning limited number of languages-intermediaries, and there is danger that the number of those languages will gradually become one (1). Let us put aside political and geopolitical aspects of that trend toward language uniformity, especially given the fact that politically, the language policy of the European Union, in particular, leans toward language plurality. It is more important to consider the undesirable consequences of the communicative principle’s dominance and the ways of neutralizing those consequences.
FLT in high school is part of the curriculum, an academic discipline, and as such it must have the objective of developing not just competencies in individual disciplines, but also overall competencies of the person, developing cognitive competences of the highest degree in particular—skills of analyzing and evaluating text statements (cognitive skills together with passive forms of speech, such as reading and listening) and skills of constructing a substantiated oral or written text (cognitive skills together with active forms of speech, such as writing and speaking). It is obvious that the teaching potential of such a discipline is much bigger than serving communicative needs, and the expansion occurs thanks to involving a large spectrum of cognitive skills in the teaching tasks and results.
None of the natural or artificial systems can imitate human thinking, his logical and cognitive categories as completely and coherently as language can. Those categories exist in the grammar of the language and its linguistic description. Does it mean that we have to return to boning up on grammar “school style” that dates back to antiquity and is conserved in many ways up until now in teaching the native language? No, because, inter alia, this kind of linguistic/grammatic approach contradicts the communicative principle: that very contradiction has been the reason why it has been rejected by modern FLT.
The new “coming” of linguistics in high school should be at the converging point of modern linguistic approaches (linguistics as a cognitive science) and tasks of modern education—to develop skills of a 21st-century man. This idea has been approbated during the 5-year study of the Ayb High School students in accordance with the integrated language program, which combines linguistic component itself with improving all 4 types of speech on the one hand, and developing cognitive competencies on the other.

Keywords: foreign language teaching (FLT), linguistic knowledge, communicative approach to FLT, integrated FLT.

References: 
[1] Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Teachers College Record, Volume 108 (6), June 2006, pp. 1017–1054.
[2] Stenhouse, L. An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. Pearson Education, 1975, p. 248.
[3] Lester, N., Corrine, B., Erickson, G., Lee, E.. Tchako, A. Writing Across The Curriculum. Urban Education, Volume 38 (1), January, 2003, pp. 5-34.