THE HOLISTIC APPROACH TO TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE S. Elovskaya 1 , T. Stanchuliak 2 , L. Karandeeva 2 1 Moscow Pedagogical State University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION) 2 Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, RUDN University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION) Abstract The article considers building a holistic foreign-language educational space within a higher educational institution as a condition for the student’s personal and professional becoming. Special attention is given to the necessity of developing the holistic approach to teaching English as a foreign language within the new scientific paradigm. This paradigm, implementing the holistic principle in teaching foreign languages, implies considering the holistic scientific world-view and facilitates forming a multifaceted image of sciences. As a final result, it will promote building the best possible system of teaching foreign languages, which will make it possible to develop the students’ professional foreign- language competency and holistic thinking in the process of learning a foreign language. The holistic (complex) approach facilitates broadening the scientific knowledge and offers manifold possibilities for the interaction of many disciplines in solving complex educational tasks which realise the principles of consistency and holism, integration, cohesion and complementation in the educational process. Keywords: foreign-language educational space; teaching foreign languages; the principle of holism; holistic approach; professionally focused education. 1 INTRODUCTION In the last decades, the system of higher education in the Russian Federation has undergone a number of large-scale changes, which followed as results of entering the world’s educational foreign- language space as well as of social and cultural changes and prospects, which cause the state’s increased requirements to graduates. It is the holistic synthetizing tendency which determines the character of modern education, strengthens the integration of scientific disciplines within the framework of interdisciplinary research and enables all participants of the educational process to think nonlinearly and holistically. The knowledge situation in the modern world determines new strategic goals of the higher education. The principles of holism, cohesion and complementation have become important cognitive principles for many scientific disciplines, as in any system, no matter how complex and nonlinear it is, the elements interaction is determined by the properties of each. The interaction of diverse theories, fields of knowledge is very efficient and leads to completely new and large-scale results in teaching students foreign languages in higher educational institutions. The holistic education concept is in our opinion the most successive theory which is able to help solve the tasks that modern society faces. 2 METHODOLOGY Specialised literature testifies that nowadays, questions of teaching foreign languages are considered in the framework of different approaches to the education: consistency, communicative, social-cultural, axiological, competence-based, contextual competence-based, cognitive, synergetic approaches, covering a wide range of problems. The latter include: acquiring a language as a system and a communication tool, which requires developing the communicative competence; acquiring knowledge about social and cultural life of native speakers of the language as well as appealing to the students’ personally significant system of values (S.G. Ter-Minasova, I.A. Tsaturova); applying the teaching methods focused on students’ psychological qualities (I.A. Zimnaya); teaching the specifics of how the system of the language signs functions and develops on the basis of the psycholinguistic analysis elements (A.A. Leontiev); considering the synergetic aspect of a foreign language learning and finding the bifurcation points as the new meaning formation in the process of nonlinear teaching (S.K. Gural, S.A. Lamzin). The specific feature of the educational systems development at the current stage is the search of efficient usage of the formal methods which supply theoretical knowledge and organise the educational process based on the artificial intelligence theory, technology and synergetics Proceedings of INTED2019 Conference 11th-13th March 2019, Valencia, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-08619-1 1253