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Educational space of a higher education institution constantly and continuously influences student’s personality as well as his / her developing as a competent specialist. The research was aimed at substantiating pedagogical technologies that optimize the process of forming students’ foreign-language professional competence within the educational space of a higher education institution. Theoretical (analysis, synthesis, comparison, systematization, pedagogical modelling), empirical (observation, pedagogical experiment, peer review method, reflexive evaluation method) and statistical methods were applied to achieve the set goal. Educational space of a higher education institution is defined as a purposefully created, methodically provided continuum of students’ foreign-language professional communication under conditions of which the development of their personality and effective formation of their foreign-language professional competence take place. Foreign-language professional competence as an integrative personality trait, determined by the synthesis of knowledge and skills, professional and life experience, values that ensure long-term readiness and ability to pursue professional activity in a foreign language, is developed effectively if the educational space of a higher education institution is multilingual and multicultural in its nature, broad, rich in foreign-language professional content, open, directed outwards. When designing educational space, it is necessary to rationally combine educational and non-educational components, provide in-class and out-of-class / extracurricular foreign-language educational and cognitive activities of students, use facilities of virtual educational environment, apply technics of contextual teaching, implement imitative and playing activities, interactive forms of training (games, project activity, case-study). In-class educational activity influences such components of foreign-language competence as “knowledge” and “skills”, whereas an extracurricular one aims at forming “values” and “experience”.

The article highlights the problem of subjective choice in making strategic life decisions and its correlation with conscience. The study describes the nature of strategic life decision-making, determines types of strategic life decisions, discloses the essence of human experiences associated with strategic life decision-making, and provides results of empirical research. Decision-making, as viewed in scientific psychological practice, is an intense cognitive process for which a human actor should be prepared to perform, drawing upon a full range of knowledge, abilities, skills, and personal qualities. Decisions, though varied by type and degree of difficulty and complexity, are united by choice – that is the individual’s choice as such. Crucial moments of decision-making may affect people in myriad ways. This article analyses the experiences of such human actors while making strategic life decisions, defined by scientists to mean outstanding, fateful, associated with great responsibility, with their leading role in human living space, and formation of a person’s way of living. Emotions and emotional responses occupy a space of paramount importance in this type of decision-making. As strategic life decisions are cognizantly and predominantly made mainly in late adolescence, the authors present summarized results of the empirical research that was carried out for several years among students enrolled in a variety of higher educational institutions within Ukraine.