"THE MANUAL IS VERY MUCH LIKE ANY OTHER BOOK…": FROM SKILLS AND HABITS TO CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING

Modern educational process is getting more and more interactive which presupposes the employment of brand new textbooks and the most difficult to be written are manuals for studying foreign languages. Over the past decades interest in learning languages in Russia might be justified by globalization (the consequence of which is the phenomenon of interactivity) that results in developing new demands to foreign language textbooks among which the primary ones are to be communicative, situational, problemsolving, and (relatively) easy to obtain the form and content of a foreign language. More complex demands to a manual in general and to a foreign language textbook in particular consider it to be the product of conceptual system, the method of achieving educational goals, and the control lever of managing the learning process. Meanwhile, as the monitoring of the modern instructional materials demonstrates there is an obvious deficit of foreign language textbooks and manuals that could completely satisfy the demands declared and – which is even more important – could stimulate the development of the meaningful attitude to the study of a foreign language. This gives us reason to consider the topic chosen for the paper to be an issue of concern and urgency. Without criticizing or questioning the authoritative opinions over the quality of the current foreign language textbooks the author makes an attempt to define the essence of a textbook, to revise the demands to it and to describe the potential challenges of its writing.