Formation of cognitive interest of school students as condition of quality increase of foreign-language education

The article discusses the importance of improvement of foreign-language education quality in mass school, axiological issues of foreign language education in the contemporary world, the enhancing of its status in various fields of activity. It indicates the cultural and pedagogical potential of foreign language as a subject for personal development in conditions of a certain dissonance between social inquiries of society, demands for quality and the lack of personal interest in languages studying observed. The authors devote a considerable attention to the disclosure of cognitive interest significance in the effectiveness of teaching foreign languages. The potential for cognitive interest in today’s educational situation is considered on the basis of historical experience analysis with its emphasis on a qualitative component of training. The analysis of the problem in historical and pedagogical aspects allows revealing the main social and pedagogical and cultural and stratum factors stimulating formation and development of cognitive interest in the course of the foreign languages learning in mass school within the last one and a half centuries. The problem is at the crossroads of three Sciences - Pedagogy, Philology and Linguo-didactics. The analysis and creative reconsideration of its achievements allow offering the complex of conditions to form the interest in foreign language learning and comprehension of foreign-language culture at all the levels in mass school: initial, middle, senior.