Uliya Novikova

The relevance of the study is caused by the need to form socio-cultural associations with the help of a foreign language school textbook for subsequent manipulation and formation of value-personal attitudes among students. The problem in the development of associative thinking has become the integration of educational goals and the content of the textbook into the traditional teaching of a foreign language in a secondary school. The purpose of the study is to understand whether a modern foreign language student’s book forms associations that can stimulate an imaginative and associative range of ideas about the culture of the country of the language being studied and, as a result, the cognitive activity of students. The objectives of the study include the examination of the concepts of a textbook and an educational text that establishes associations, analysis of scientific works on the physiopsychological mechanisms of associations in domestic and foreign literature, consideration of the theoretical foundations for the formation of associations in the theories of psychoanalysis developed by Z. Freud and C. Jung, analysis of educational texts for their potential to evoke images and ideas. The ranges of school textbooks (Student's book) included in the Federally Approved List of Textbooks served as practical material for the study. The author comes to the conclusion that a modern foreign language textbook does not fully meet the request for the formation of such associations that could increase the effect of memorization and further stimulate cross-cultural communication and direct contact with native foreign language speakers. The author formulated a number of proposals for modernizing the content of the text material of a modern foreign language textbook. These include, in particular, the mind-mapping technology with the help of which a large amount of information may be memorized. Smart maps organize all the information we know according to the same principle as the work of the human brain, i.e. not in a strict hierarchical order. Instead, the associations coming out (or coming in) from different connecting elements help our brain navigate through a huge amount of information. Supplementing the textbook with visualized smart maps to educational texts will help make a tool for communication and creativity, which is used even now, but only by some teachers.

The article analyses the freewriting and mapping methods helping to make process of preparation for the essay more interesting and exciting. The purpose of the paper is exclusively educational: to see how these methods work in relation to an English essay. Besides the theoretical justification of these methods, the paper features the examples of their practical application.