THE INTERRELATION OF COGNITIVE AND COMMUNICATIVE ASPECTS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING FOR NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

The integration of cognitive and communicative dimensions in foreign language (FL) instruction at non-linguistic universities remains underexplored despite the growing professional demand for multilingual competence. This study investigates how cognitive mechanisms, specifically categorization, conceptual mapping, and schema activation, interact with the development of communicative competence among students whose primary specialization lies outside the domain of linguistics. A quasi-experimental mixed-methods design was employed involving 86 undergraduate students at the Uzbek State University of World Languages over two academic semesters. The experimental group followed an integrative cognitive-communicative methodology, while the control group received instruction via conventional approaches. Results demonstrated statistically significant gains in the experimental group across fluency, pragmatic appropriateness, and metacognitive strategy deployment. The findings confirm that embedding cognitive scaffolding within communicative tasks produces measurable improvements in spoken and written FL production, with implications for curriculum design at non-linguistic higher education institutions.