Keyword: «sociolinguistic approach»

The sociolinguistic component is one of the important elements of foreign language teaching. For a long time, it has had the status of a competence of the second or even third order in regard to communicative and sociocultural competences. However, recently there has appeared a drift to raise its status as high as an approach. The aim of the article is to find out how far the development of the sociolinguistic approach has progressed in the context of foreign language teaching in higher educational institutions and how valid its allocation into an independent approach is. The research is carried out on the material of an array of publications by domestic and foreign authors, which are in open access on e-library and research gate platforms and cover the period from 2000 to 2023. As a result, two groups of works devoted to the use of the sociolinguistic approach in teaching foreign languages in higher education are identified. Practice-oriented works open up its application in teaching certain aspects of the language, types of speech activity, as well as describe certain tools or toolkits that can be used to implement the approach in practice. The theoretical works formulate some provisions of the sociolinguistic approach: they substantiate its place in the system of foreign language teaching in relation to other approaches, formulate its main tasks and develop its conceptual apparatus. The authors of the article reveal that at present there is no holistic perception of the sociolinguistic approach to foreign language teaching, and identify a range of issues to discuss, their solution possibly making a significant impact on building the theoretical basis of the approach under consideration. Such debatable issues include the relationship "individual – general" in speech characteristics of a certain social group, the attitude to standard and substandard language, the influence of social context on foreign language teaching conditions. The expediency of singling out the sociolinguistic approach in the realm of culture-based approaches remains open at the moment. The study pays special attention to the specificity of the sociolinguistic component manifested in the conditions of foreign language teaching at non-language universities.