THE DISCOURSE OF "FLOW" IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

The paper provides an analytical review of the flow theory by M. Csikszentmihalyi, a prominent representative of positive psychology, in the context of methodology and methods of teaching a foreign language. “The emotional turn” in the humanities opens up vast prospects for a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the foreign language educational process, complementing the discourse of cognitive pedagogy. Flow as a mental state of full involvement in an activity is characterized by clarity of goals, stable feedback, compliance of skills with challenges, increased concentration, escape from current concerns, control of the situation, exit from self-reflection, acceleration of time, shifting the emphasis from the result to the process. Flow, driven by the emotional sphere of a person, overcomes the poles of apathy, anxiety and boredom, providing a resource for an increased level of solving the tasks. It is important to be able to cause a flow, manage it and direct it in the right way, focusing on positive and negative emotional predictors, analyzing the characteristics of predisposition and involvement, as well as the state of anti-flow. The search for happiness in the flow is realized on the basis of receiving satisfaction from personal growth in the dialectic of entropic and negentropic states of the psyche. Direct parallels are drawn between the theory of flow and the concept of “proximal development” by L.S. Vygotsky, explaining the conditions for successful learning. Options for methodical implementation of the flow in a foreign-language audience through interactive, group, project forms of educational activity, gamification, autonomy of students, a creative approach under the sensitive guidance of a teacher are considered. From a philosophical and pedagogical standpoint, the state of flow appears as an energetic phenomenon that reveals the existential potential of the individual and the content of a genuine educational continuum, which presupposes the subjectification of knowledge and an exit from the objectification of the formal educational process, its humanization as opposed to technological depersonalization, that is especially clearly manifested in the specifics of foreign language education.