This article is devoted to socio-economic changes of the country, reforms of educational system, and new requirements in the field of foreign language education. The study of the methodology of teaching a foreign language as an applied linguistics is due to the fact that the methodology of the 1930s did not sufficiently define the specificity of a foreign language as a subject and did not develop a system of research methods.It is common knowledge that in pedagogy and methodology there is one object of study - processes of training, goals and objectives of training, education and the content of subjects.

The practice of teaching a foreign language requires the development of problems of the content of teaching methods and techniques, its goals and objectives. The study of the problem of domestic didactics made it possible to reveal that in the Soviet methodological literature there is different coverage of the issue of teaching a foreign language during the studied period.