For a long period of time it was generally recognized that the aim of higher school in terms of ELT was to give students fundamental theoretical knowledge, to build up language and communicative competence. At the same time, the methods of independent rational organization of educational process were almost neglected. In other words, this process wasn’t monitored by the teachers. This resulted in the students’ adopting an irrational style of independent learning, which had a negative effect on both the efficiency of education in general and the quality of specialist training in particular. The specialists very often found themselves inadequate when faced with the dramatic changes in lifestyles, conditions of professional activity, and accelerated pace of events.

Meanwhile, contemporary society is in need of specialists possessing a consistent, logical mentality, a high level of self-regulation and self-organization, able to rationally schedule their time, independently acquire new professional knowledge and extend their general and special competence, capable of working out their own productive methods of making decisions and coping with challenges.

It is clear from the aforesaid that besides language instruction students should be taught how to develop a rational approach to the educational activity. This may be considered as a necessary prerequisite for the increase of specialists’ professional standards. Consequently, the teachers at higher educational institutions face the task of equipping the students with a complex of rational EFL learning skills. In order to fulfil this task it is necessary to analyze the structure and content of the notion of educational rationality.

On the one hand, while developing proficiency in a certain type of activity, a person should realize the whole structure of this activity, the entire complex of actions, that is, to outline the “programme” of actions. Awareness of this programme presupposes the development of knowledge about the integral constituents of a particular activity, about the methods of acting and carrying out operations (empirically verified and theoretically grounded). In other words, the program contains a set of normally approved actions, which must be regarded as an imperative, fixed in the “software” of the given activity.

From this perspective, educational rationality is based on acquisition of normally approved experience, which is accumulated by generations and is represented as an aggregated ideal template for the fulfillment of rational procedures and operations in the rational order.

Therefore, it can be said that educational rationality includes a normatively rational component, which has proved to be effective and has been fixed in the programme necessary for the student who is mastering one activity or another.

On the other hand, the normatively rational components of an activity are inevitably extended by a personal experience. Everyone develops their own, individually more suitable style of activity, which includes the factor of predilection for a particular method of activity that ensures a higher level of rationality. This component can be called individually rational. It is connected with an individual’s conscious control over his/her own behaviour in concrete situations, which presupposes flexibility and the ability to choose appropriate ways of action. By elaborating these methods, the individual can achieve the highest efficiency.

Consequently, the student can try different strategies and different methods of acting; finally, s/he makes an ultimate decision in selecting the very strategy that best matches his idea of a rational approach to a learning activity.

Therefore, we understand the mastering of an activity as acquiring a combination of normatively rational and individually rational components. It is this combination that professional activity largely depends on for its efficiency.

On the basis of the above outline we can give a definition of learning rationality. We regard it, on the one hand, as a student’s specific activity leading to creative and constructive development of his/her personality due to reflexive analysis of educational effort, self-criticism, and self-correction, which enables one to find out a possible divergence from the established normatively rational method of learning activity. On the other hand, our understanding of learning activity rationalization presupposes the development of individually rational methods of learning activity, which conform to individual peculiarities of a student and define his/her own peculiar set of optimal, efficient, and effective ways of learning.

These statements allow us to define our notion of rational educational activity in language learning: it is regarded as a dual entity which is characterized by the unity of normatively rational and individually rational components. The more detailed interpretation of rational approach to foreign language learning presupposes the following line of analysis.

First of all, the student must tackle with the tasks which are officially approved and outlined in the Statements of Foreign Language Learning Programme by means of working with the assigned course books. These normative actions in general represent the algorithms of learning activities: the stipulated order of actions leading to the set aims. Given these algorithms, the students develop their language and communicative skills in the most rational way.

Normatively rational activities for foreign language learning can be found in different parts of course books: for instance, in presenting the rules, in exercise instructions, and so on. Careful carrying out of these tasks and assignments, as well as constant monitoring by the teacher guarantee a certain standard of language learning.

However, the process of foreign language learning isn’t restricted to careful fulfillment of the teacher’s assignments. The students devote a great deal of their time to independent language learning. This process is outside the scope of the teacher’s monitoring; the teacher can only assess the results of this independent work. These results often show that the individual style thus developed doesn’t always ensure the quality and efficiency of educational activity just because is not rational. In other words, many students, even seniors, select educational alternatives inefficiently.

That is why it is necessary to develop the students’ individually rational style of learning, which, in our opinion, represents a set of skills specific to foreign language learning. This development is the result of understanding, selection, and experimental check of definite rules of predilection, marked by restrictive characteristics.