Concept sphere of lifelong learning: logic and methodology of the study

the review of the interdisciplinary study of the concept sphere of lifelong learning accomplished by the team of the authors at the State Petrozavodsk University in 2012−2016 on the basis of comparative analysis of Russian, English, German, French sources is presented. The appropriateness of the terms «concept sphere of lifelong learning» and «chronotope of lifelong learning» is validated by the author. The concept sphere of lifelong learning is defined as the structuralized array (system) of concepts representing the idea of the education in the course of life on the different levels of the social consciousness. The author enumerates the approaches and methods, allowing readers to reveal the actual status, main tendencies and contradictions of the concept sphere development both in total and separate components with the use of the lexical corpus comparable by the meaning. The methodology of the study is revealed through the systematic-synergetic, comparative-pedagogical, linguo-pedagogical, chronotope approaches; the methods of theoretical and semantic analysis, frequency term analysis, analogies, and also theoretical modeling and the Internet search. The description of the logic of the first two stages of the study of poly-linguistic array of the infor-mation − linguo-pedagogical and chronotopic − is presented. The guide lines of the further study of various stages of lifelong learning from social-pedagogical, chronotopic, and linguo-pedagogical positions are outlined. The suggested methodological approaches are of interest for methodologists and researches of lifelong learning, linguists, interpreters, and translators.