Scientific Collection «InterConf», (39): with the Proceedings of the 8th International Scientific and Practical Conference «Science and Practice: Implementation to Modern Society» (December 26-28, 2020) at Manchester, Great Britain

1. Introduction. The analysis of the psychological characteristics of the civil 
servants mastering English process highlights permanent aspects of training civil 
servants efficiency improvement throughout 1) observation and identification of the 
peculiar features of the English acquisition process; 2) comparing the obtained 
empirical data about the adult learners’ learning process; 3) and finding possible ways 
to overcome the singled out challenges. 
2. Body. 
The foreign language mentality of civil servants in the communicative circuit of 
teaching English has not attracted enough attention of English teachers yet, however, 
in the context of a change in the content paradigm of the educational process and the 
search for the new opportunities on the one hand and the advancement of the concept 
of “lifelong learning” on the other, the relevance of the study of the educational process 
peculiarities increases in an older or "adult" audience. The key question that arises 
today for English language methodologists (mentors) and English trainers is the study 
of the adult learner educational process effective organization in the system of 
postgraduate education of civil servants and scientists, who are required to achieve the 
competence level of the English language B2 according to the Common European 
Framework of Reference for Languages [1]. 
Thus, we can determine the purpose of the article by analyzing the results of empirical 
research conducted on the basis of observation and analysis of the behavior of civil servants 
in English classes, localize the main types of perception, classify and determine the ways of 
the most effective work of civil servants in groups in the process of forming their English-
speaking communicative consciousness in the system of adult education. 
1.2. Preliminary observations.
Today, the anthropological orientation of the modern linguistic science 
encourages us to analyze and actively involve modern studies of cultural linguistics, 
cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and conceptology in the process of forming the 
English-speaking communicative consciousness of the adult group of civil servants in 
the system of lifelong education. 

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Since the proposed approach is based on the awareness of the need to make 
changes to the existing, already established traditional paradigm of the professional 
training as a guideline for the professional and personal development of today’s desk-
officer in the system of the continuous education, this contributes to the deepening of 
their professional development, rethinking and acquiring new practical experience, 
professional skills, and influences the improvement of the already formed ones. 
In this sense, A. P Zagnitko comes up with a very interesting idea, concerning the 
existence of interrelations between the modern transition to anthropological linguistics 
and modifications of the scientific paradigm, bringing it closer to humans, their 
thinking and consciousness development process [5]. This, in turn, provokes certain 
interest in the study of different types of critical thinking and adult learner perception 
of different linguistic cultures, their understanding and interpretation of the linguistic 
signs in the system of continuous education.
We also share the opinion of L.D. Stolyarenko and believe that the success of 
teaching adult learners depends primarily on psychological factors, as well as on the 
teacher's understanding of the main characteristics of learners, their ability to perceive 
material, memorize, process, use it in solving various problems [12]. 
When we consider civil servants studying a foreign language, we must understand 
that this category of language learners has different psycholinguistic, linguistic and 
psychological characteristics. It should also be noted that teaching English in the 
system of postgraduate education of civil servants is associated with conceptual 
thinking and productive internal and external motivated scientific, self-educational and 
creative activities and requires continuous improvement, self-improvement, and 
personal autonomous development. In this connection, the combination of personal and 
professional qualities of civil servants cannot be ignored, and should be considered and 
analyzed at the philosophical, methodological, linguistic, social and cultural levels. 
Let us consider the psycholinguistic features of the perception and interpretation 
of speech signs by the adult group of learners. With the outlined question in mind, we 
turned to the neuropsychology.

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For a teacher working in the adult group of learners, it is important to understand 
the difference between the learning processes of various age groups of students. It 
should be noted that, for example, an infant (a very young learner) has a widespread 
network of nerve cells in the auditory cortex, which makes it possible to perceive and 
process the sounds of all languages of the world during the first years of his/her life. 
However, the child predominantly hears only the native speech, and under the influence 
of it the differential sensitivity is formed only to the native speech sounds and prosodic 
design. Tuning into the native language, this ability decreases and over the following 
years it begins to serve as a kind of filter that allows the intonation and sounds of only 
the native speech to pass through. At the same time, all unfamiliar and alien sounds in 
the speech stream of a foreign language are cut off, deformed and adapted to the 
familiar native ones; they are exposed to false associations, and as a result of which an 
adult learner hears something different from what was said by the native speaker. 
This theory partially explains the emerging problems of the reception of someone 
else's speech, which, in turn, leads to the problems with foreign language reproduction, 
because incorrectly heard and identified auditory images of the phrases and words are 
also reproduced incorrectly, since speaking is necessarily accompanied by the control 
from the auditory analyzer, and in the long-term student's memory must have the 
corresponding auditory-pronunciation patterns-invariants. The problem with 
reproduction is further complicated by the fact that the articulatory base of an adult is 
also formed under the influence of the native language, and the organs of speech have 
lost their natural plasticity [10: 184]. The discrepancy between thought and speech 
structures caused by the clash of different types of thinking in the process of 
intercultural communication leads to various modifications of these speech structures 
in the minds of civil servants and often causes the emergence of the interlingual 
interference, or "false associations" in the minds of adult learners. In this process, the 
phenomenon of the student's associative field plays an important role. 
E.S. Kubryakova believes that such interlingual interference is the result of an 
erroneous interpretation of a speech sign, an associative replacement of one sign with 

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another sign, or, in the overwhelming majority, a set of signs " [9: 23], which form the 
associative fields in the minds of foreign language learners. This concept of associative 
fields creating in the minds of foreign language learners is interpreted by scientists as 
a series of objectified words-reactions to the proposed words-stimuli [6: 21]. These 
objectified words-reactions are able to evoke certain associations to a stimulus, which 
represent a key lexical unit in the learner's mind. Such a key lexical unit is characterized 
by a whole set of associations, where the most frequent associations are the core, and 
the less frequent, sporadic associations belong to the so-called "periphery". 
For the foreign language teaching methodology, understanding the boundaries of 
speech associations is essential, since it stimulates a clear limitation and delimitation 
of the associative interpretations, compliance with the clear limits for the usage of any 
concept in the mind of a person studying a foreign language. Ivaschenko draws 
attention to the close connection between the concept and its associative space, since 
"concepts (appearing in it) are stored in the semantic memory", and the information 
obtained is further systematized in the mind of a foreign language learner in the form 
of semantic (associative-verbal) networks like a hierarchy of word associations [7]. 
The associative-verbal network is considered as one of the means of language 
representation, which according to Karaulov represents the grounds for the foreign 
language learner’s speech ability [8]. In this way, the nature and peculiarity of the reactions 
in the associative fields of native speakers give an idea of the word usage context and in 
every case help finding a completely justified psycholinguistically content for a native 
speaker. For a native speaker, the associations represent the evidence of the traditional 
usage of a particular word, the understanding of its meaning, which allows him/her to 
determine “the most actual and active layer of the concept” [11: 43]. 
In particular, considering E. Kudryakova’s approach to the adult learners’ 
interpretation of linguistic signs, it is worth noting that in the minds of adult learners 
(who have already cumulated certain experience in their own field of civil service), this 
linguistic sign shows the ability to “be replaced by another, similar, sign, or, in the 
majority of cases, by a set of signs” [9]. 

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Thus, we see that the ability to interpret different linguistic signs, to compare the 
linguistic signs of the native and target languages, to rely on the similarity of the 
articulation or sounding of the native and target languages is a widespread source of 
interlingual interference. 
Comparing the likelihood of incorrect associations appearance in the associative 
fields of the students from different age groups, it should be noted that this 
phenomenon is more vivid with civil servants (whose age ranges from 30 to 60 years 
old) than among students aged 17-20. Our observations show that adult learners 
experience more difficulties with pronunciation and stress patterns than students of the 
same level of language proficiency, and at the same time the adults demonstrate 
spending 3-4 times more on learning new vocabulary, and 4 times making more 
mistakes in speech production. At the same time, adults show much more perseverance 
when doing exercises. They have a strong tendency to complete all tasks of their 
homework; they are usually much more responsible and persistent. In their majority 
they are more motivated but more conservative. 
In addition, each adult learner has already acquired a number of previously formed 
training strategies. Working with groups of civil servants and analysis of questionnaires 
conducted applying Google Form technology, showed, that adult are learners prefer 
language (lexical, grammatical) exercises of a non-communicative nature, with 
instructions such as: "fill in the blanks", or "put in the required form word" than 
students of 1-2 year of a language faculty. The later prefer to learn the language in real 
communication. On the contrary, the adult learners stubbornly insist on the 
indispensable introduction of exercises to translate separate sentences or the entire text, 
justifying their preferences by "a more accurate understanding of the text meaning".
At the same time, the omitting of tasks "for text translation" often causes some 
dissatisfaction among the more aged category of such learners, they often express 
rejection of the communicative methodology, new to them. 
In general, the groups of civil servants are much more diverse in their 
composition, not only in basic education, but also in terms of perception. The adult 

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learners who have previously studied German or French in school or university 
experience the greatest challenges. The adult trilinguals’ interlingual interference 
increases in proportion to the increase the erroneous interpretations of speech signs. 
Having lost communicative skills in the previously studied languages, they do not lose 
the articulatory and pronunciation ones, as well as the rhythmic-intonation and 
syntactic skills for constructing sentences of a previously studied first foreign language, 
and, since they are again faced with the task of studying a “new foreign” language, 
they subconsciously transfer these earlier acquired skills from the first "foreign" 
language to the second one. In this process, they persistently continue to use 
substitutions according to the association from the first studied language. In this 
connection we would like to note, that it is their conviction in the use of previously 
formed speech skills of the first foreign language and the efforts to modify the speech 
structures in the minds of such students, a kind of "conservatism" and persistence of 
theis create special hedges for such adult learners, preventing them understanding 
peculiarities of the thinking of English native speakers. Such students take much longer 
to overcome interlingual interference, they are more likely to show impatience while 
being corrected, they more easily lose motivation to learn a second foreign language, 
and more than others need encouragement and constant psychological support. 
The next category of civil servants, who also experience great challenges and need 
support, are elderly (aged 50-60 years) learners who did not study any foreign 
languages at all, or studied English long time ago at school and today, having quite a 
lot of experience in their field (especially those who occupy leading positions in the 
government), are forced to study English in order to get a certificate confirming B2 
level of English proficiency, in order to be able to continue to carry out their routine 
activities. This category of learners have a tendency to demonstrate intolerance and 
quick irritability, in case of failure, they really do not like when their speech errors are 
corrected, they usually answer with a loud voice in class. A long absence of work in 
terms of speech development, the disability to formulate their own thoughts in a foreign 
language and the desire to find associations or analogies with the native language in 

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everything, rather than listening to and following the teacher's instructions, as well as 
the intolerance and leadership habits, can also complicate their problem of mastering 
English. 
The next category of “difficult” learners is “busy bosses”. These students are 
constantly distracted for short periods away from work; they are constantly "at work", 
their mobiles phone every 15-20 minutes, they constantly leave the office, then come 
back and try again and again to focus on the studied material. Quite often, they cannot 
immediately understand the material and ask to explain again, distracting everybody. 
At each lesson, they require new homework, but almost never do it on their own, due 
to the lack of free time, and again take on new obligations regarding the completion of 
new tasks. As these students are “constantly at work,” they cannot concentrate on the 
study material, easily fall into panic, and lose faith in being able to learn English to the 
desired level. The teacher's calmness and patience, as well as politeness and a desire to 
help quickly deal with the missed material of colleagues at work, contribute to the 
effectiveness of work with such students. It was noticed that these learners enjoy 
working in mini-groups. 
The easiest to work are the learners who already acquired certain skills in English 
and who want to improve their skills as quickly as possible. They usually do almost all 
homework, interested in new, more effective methods and technologies of learning 
English. 
The next factor affecting the quality and effectiveness of the civil servants’ 
English speaking skills formation is their individual psychological characteristics, 
which determine the type of thinking, a set of already established personal learning 
strategies, which also affects the success of the learning process.
According to the belief of most teachers, it is has the greatest influence on the 
success of training. 
Another classification proposed by E.U. Gutsalo is also interesting, according to 
which the following types of perception are distinguished, namely: synthetic, 
analytical, analytical-synthetic, emotional [4]. 

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Learners of the synthetic type of perception are characterized by a tendency 
towards generalizations, the desire to immediately grasp the main essence of the 
perceived information. They do not attach importance to details and are not inclined to 
delve into them, they often do not pay attention to the details and, as a result, make lots 
of mistakes in their speeches and in tests, where knowledge of details is checked. 
The learners of the analytical type of perception scrupulously delve into all the 
details, even if there is no need, they try to highlight and analyze everything. 
The learners of a mixed analytical-synthetic type of perception are equally trying 
to understand the essence of the phenomenon and actually confirm it, striving for 
analysis and synthesis. 
The most inattentive and making the most mistakes are students of the emotional 
type of perception, who attach exceptional importance to their experiences caused by 
this or that phenomenon, and as a result, the perception and observation of such 
students is disorganized, incomplete (ibid.). 
According to our observations, each of the described types of perception finds its 
representatives in each group of civil servants and, accordingly, sets the task of 
developing an individual, most comfortable and effective approach to each student, 
taking into account his/her psychological and psycholinguistic characteristics. 
It should be noted that learners of the synthetic type of perception support the 
application of communicative tasks, they are ready to discuss texts, they are eager to 
complete listening and reading tasks, followed by a discussion of the problem. The 
learners of the analytical type are more inclined to support the use of grammar and 
lexical translation methods, tend to deeply analyze phenomena and finding the 
difference or shades of meanings of the similar phrases from the first lessons of 
learning (for example, greeting phrases “How are you?”, “How are you going ” and “ 
How are things ”, or“ Have you got a… .. ”and“ Do you have a… .. ”). Learners of the 
emotional type of perception include the above-described category of being "difficult" 
students, where learning is accompanied by the emotional experience and, accordingly, 
is motivated by it. 

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The problem of singling out the types of adult learners’ perception is becoming 
more acute and deep with the forced transition to distance learning from spring 2020. 
During training under quarantine conditions, the widely applied cloud technologies can 
significantly improve the quality of visualization of the studied material and 
availability of information, and help decrease the motivation level of learners of any 
age group [3]. So, in order to overcome such difficulties as absent-mindedness and the 
inability to concentrate on performing only one task, working remotely via Zoom, the 
teacher can display the text of the exercise on the main screen and using the abilities 
of the "notes and corrections" menu on the main screen, enter the correct answers of 
the students just after they have been voiced. The next powerful tool for improving the 
efficiency of the work with an adult audience was the use of the Mindomo.com 
platform for drawing up mind maps in the process of learning new vocabulary, or at 
the stage of developing communicative skills.