TEACHING ENGLISH IN NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY USING CRITICAL THINKING DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGY

The article is devoted to the problems of developing critical thinking skills and abilities in students majoring in law in order to prepare them for productive professional activity in the context of significant information saturation of modern society. The article reveals the pedagogical potential of the technology for developing critical thinking and substantiates the relevance of its use in social and humanitarian training at the university, since the formation of personal and professional qualities of future lawyers through the development of their critical thinking is an effective factor in increasing the competitiveness of young specialists in the labor market. According to the authors of the article, this technology, being a universal methodological tool for problem-based, communicative-oriented learning, allows optimizing foreign language training of future lawyers, contributing to the development and improvement of both subject competencies and professionally significant universal, meta-subject cognitive, communicative and reflexive skills and abilities that ensure self-control and self-regulation of students' educational activities. The experience of using various strategies of critical thinking development technology to enable students to master the four components of the critical thinking structure (cognitive, analytical, behavioral and personal) is summarized. The effectiveness of organizing English language teaching using the technology of critical thinking development was confirmed during a pedagogical experiment, which allowed the authors to conclude that the integration of elements of critical thinking development technology into the practice of language training in legal fields is a prerequisite for the formation of universal skills and abilities as mandatory components of the competency model of a future employee of the penal system.