Within the framework of the implementation of the modern theory and methodology of teaching foreign languages and cultures, the paper deals with the issue related to the formation and development of lexical competence of students studying in foreign language, when the purpose of teaching a foreign language along with the formation of communicative competence is the personal development of students. The paper substantiates the provision on the fact that in the process of decoding a polysemantic word, the consciousness of the student does not address to all dictionary meanings at once, as is customary in conventional semantic descriptions; the actuation of exclusively the most common semantic components necessary for understanding the speech context is sufficient. Behind the entire semantic structure of a polysemantic word in the language consciousness stands an invariant cluster as a set of the most stable and frequency semantic features, which over time are formed in the language consciousness of the native speaker and in one of their configurations participate in the process of decoding a particular contextual meaning in accordance with the intuition of the average native speaker. As a result of using the approach proposed in the paper, the effective formation of skills and abilities of foreign language communication, mastering the experience of the creative activity, as well as the formation of a culture of thinking and cognitive interests of students by means of a foreign language, occur.