Глоба О.В. Розвиток комунікативної компетенції майбутніх учителів початкової школи засобами навчального дискурсу
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Глоба О.В. –доцент кафедри іноземних мов та методики їх викладання НПУ імені М.П. Драгоманова Інституту педагогіки та психології НПУ імені М.П. Драгоманова, м. Київ.
У статті розглянено питання розвитку мовленнєвої компетенції засобами англійської мови у студентів першого року навчання спеціалізації «Початкове навчання». Подано визначення мовленнєвої компетенції, навчального дискурсу, пропонуються ефективні, з точки зору автора, підходи і прийоми для становлення основ мовленнєвої компетенції студентів через інтенсивну роботу з навчальним дискурсом.
Ключові слова: мовлення, мова, комунікативна компетенція, комунікативний підхід, прийоми, дискурс.
В настоящее время проблема повышения качества образования есть одной из самых острых, а одним из средств достижения этой цели является поиск новых эффективных подходов к обучению будущих специалистов и их практическое использование в процессе работы преподавателя. Поэтому статья рассматривает вопросы развития речевой компетенции на базе английского языка у студентов первого года обучения специализации «Начальное обучение». В статье даются определение речевой компетенции, обучающего дискурса, предлагаются эффективные с точки зрения автора подходы и приемы для становления основ речевой компетенции студентов через интенсивную работу с обучающим дискурсом. Перспективными целями дальнейших исследований, как это видит автор, могут являться цели исследования подходов и приемов усовершенствования речевой компетенции студентов на старших курсах обучения.
Ключевые слова: речь, язык, коммуникативная компетенция, коммуникативный подход, приемы, дискурс.
Currently, the quality of education is one of the most critical issues, and one of the means to achieve this goal is to find new and effective approaches to teaching future professionals and their practical use in the work of the teacher. The article examines the approaches and techniques of communicative competency development that are used in the process of teaching the English language the first year students specialized in "Primary education". The article discusses such concepts as: speech competence, educational discourse, effective (from the point of view of the author) approaches and techniques for the bases of speech competence of students through intensive work with the educational discourses. The perspective goals of further researches, as the author sees them, are working out approaches and techniques of speech competency development for intermediate and upper intermediate levels of English study.
Key words: speech, language, communicative competence, communicative approach, methods, discourse.
Зміст |
Постановка проблеми
Currently, the quality of education is one of the most critical issues, and one of the means to achieve this goal is to find new and effective approaches to teaching future professionals and their practical use in the work of the teacher. The article examines the approaches and techniques of communicative competency development that are used in the process of teaching the English language the first year students specialized in "Primary education".
Постановка мети дослідження
The article discusses such concepts as: speech competence, educational discourse, effective (from the point of view of the author) approaches and techniques for the bases of speech competence of students through intensive work with the educational discourses. The perspective goals of further researches, as the author sees them, are working out approaches and techniques of speech competency development for intermediate and upper intermediate levels of English study.
Виклад основного матеріалу
In our educational establishment, we chose to teach our students using “Language Leader” by Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S. because, from our point of view, this textbook completely meets the needs of our students to further develop their speech competency, provide teachers with necessary tools to train their students’ foreign speech skills and to share various types of knowledge critical for acquiring competence.
The current article analyses how this manual helps the first year students to improve communicative competence.The Ukrainian methodologists define the concept ‘communicative competence’ as“коло питань, у яких дана особа має певні знання, досвід, повноваження і які здатна вирішити” [3,c.55]. Thus, in our time to master a foreign language presupposes having obtained the certain level of communicative competence to implement it under circumstances of foreign environment while speech competence is one of its four constituencies: speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
As the communicative approach has been chosen for the class work, the textbook materials offer a great variety and number of activities having communicative character. To illustrate this statement, we need to analyze just few of them. Presenting activities below, the order of putting numbers and letters for them were given as in the textbook.
Vocabulary activity: 1a Work with a partner to think of as many personality adjectives as you can, e.g., friendly, happy, sad [8, c.7].
Fulfilling the activities, the students have to remember adjectives describing traits of character, human emotions, feelings, lifestyles, etc. More than that, they obligatorily exchange the words with the partner, help each other rememberinformation, teach each other, and even test. Together with learning objective to remember and practice vocabulary, they also need to accomplish communicative objectives such as: to establish good productive relationship with a partner, to contribute into mutual result, to be attentive, polite, and cooperative, to be a good receptive listener, and to motivate a partner to work.
As we can see from examples presented below, the students are to more intensively interact with each other in speaking activities. They formulate their own utterance sharing their opinion on the subject and percept the utterance of their partner reacting on it somehow. They have a dialogue which may turn into discussion if they have different opinions on the proposed topic. Usually, the tasks of speaking activities are given in a form of provocative questions which motivates students to communicate.
Speaking: 9.Work with a partner to discuss the following. 1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a strong personality? 2. What is a ‘personality clash’? Have you ever had a personality clash with someone? What happened? 3. What tells you more about a person’s personality: their appearance, their voice, their attitude or something else [8, c.7].
Speaking: 8. Work with a partner to complete a text about Carl Jung. Take turns to ask and answer questions. Prepare your questions first. Students are to use different sources of information [8, c.8].
Speaking: 5 Work with a partner to discuss the following. 1. If you were choosing photographs of people for an article about charismatic people, who would you choose? 2. Is charisma the most important quality to possess if you want to be successful in your career? If not, what other qualities are important [8, c.11].
In series of grammar activities, one assignment mandatorily has communicative character practicing grammar issues through talks with a partner fulfilling several mental and speaking functions at the same time. For instance, in Unit 1, the students work on the three grammar issues: question forms, present simple, and present continuous, we can see how communicative skills are trained in the samples presented below.
Grammar: question forms: 7b work with a partner to ask and answer the questions [8, c.8].
Grammar: present simple and present continuous: 8b With a partner, take turns to ask and answer the questions. Then tell the class one interesting fact about your partner [8, c.11].
Realizing the communicative approach enhances students’ skill to use their language knowledge subconsciouslybeing focused all the time on fulfilling several simultaneous communicative tasks. This approach allows creating relaxed friendly atmosphere in the classroom, to eliminate tension of an academic environment, and to turn routine exercises into an act of creation. This type of exercises encourages students’ thinking processes, makes them analyze the material deeply, come to certain conclusions, and reproduce in a foreign language their mental product of complex inner processes.
Usually, students in one group can be divided into three categories: the students who are able to do the speaking task orally and efficiently coming through all the stages in their heads, those who need more time to think the assignment over, to write some thoughts on the paper and only then they may reproduce their ideas into oral utterance peeping into their notes time and again, the last category of students are very slow at understanding the task, they have to appeal to a teacher for any kind of help: in understanding the task, sharing ideas how to fulfill it, choosing pattern of their answer, words, and expressions, then they need time to prepare oral presentation of the answer. To balance time and attention, the teacher should facilitate accomplishment of a task for the third category of students by providing them with additional explanations, pattern cards containing helpful words, expressions, and colloquial patterns.
The pattern card for fulfilling Speaking task 9 may have the following useful prompts:
- I think the advantage of having a strong personality is … successful career / respect of colleagues / high salary/interesting life
- I think the disadvantage of having a strong personality is … large workload/lack of time for minor life pleasures/that too many people need your help
Additional explanations, adjustments of materials and order of accomplishing exercises always occur within the framework of a particular academic environment. The teacher’s book of the set provides ample additional data and alternative activities. And thereare always opportunities to apply your own creativity.
The other striking feature of the set is possibility to realize personality-oriented teaching. According to the Ukrainian methodologists: “методологічними засадами особистісно орієнтованого навчання є:1) забезпечення розвитку і саморозвитку особистості учня…2) створення можливостей для кожного учня…3) організація змісту освіти, її засобів і методів…4) формування освіченості учня…5) творення індивідуального сприйняття світу…6) багатоваріантність методик” [3, c.46]. Nowadays, the concept of “існування індивідуального лексикону як форми організації мовних і немовних знань індивіда” [5, c.209] is neither discussed nor argued. If we intend to arrange our teaching process effectively, we can’t ignore personal peculiarities, academic needs and requirements.
The program of the set completely corresponds to these requirements. As a rule, the speaking exercises emphasize self-reflection, sharing personal experience, interests, views, and perception of the outer world.
On average, speaking exercises as a rule focusing on unprepared speech amount for 14 per cent of all exercises in the training section of a unit. Also, we should take into consideration other activities involuntarily including speaking because as majority of methodologists maintain [1, 3, 6, 9] to distinctly disunite learning activities is impossible. All of them are closely interacting and complementing each other. Hence, speaking practice takes significant place in the learning process based on the Language Leader set.
At the end of every unit which is quite logical, the students are to work on case study that usually requires much talk. They are given a problem to find a solution. After analyzing all the circumstances and conditions, the students are looking for ways out. They may be asked to discuss the case in groups, with a partner, changing partners. Depending on the case, they have to make their own conclusion and present it, or elaborate common decision in groups.
The role of a teacher is to provide students with additional crucial information, explanation of cultural differencesand details of the case, help with vocabulary choice. After preliminary preparatory work within the training section, the students cope with the assignment pretty well and fast demonstrating interest, thorough language knowledge, and creativity. At this stage, it’s convenient to summarize the work on the unit, analyze results, and set up further learning objectives.
According to the experience, the students’ progress quite intensively able to process, memorize and reproduce large portions of materials owing to its versatility, novelty, originality, informativeness, and actuality.
Moreover, our students have a strong motivation to develop their communicative competence. At the turn of the new century, the Earth has become a melting pot of technologies, cultures, and languages [7, c.11]. Living in Ukraine, we drive Chinese manufacturer’s cars, watch TV made in Korea, and eat grapes grown in Turkey. Ukrainian women adhering to haute couture vogue may wear Polish embroidery, Indian trousers, and French scarves. Despite our desire, we have to knowbasic English vocabulary because the words: seduce us sparkling on huge billboards or above entrances into buildings we regularly pass by. Our life whether we are aware or unaware of the fact is frequently directed by the Internet, a disguised dictator of the globalized world. The internet’s space is also English speaking one. Opposing to these statement, it can be established that survival without English is possible in Ukraine. Definitely, survival is possible but prosperity isn’t.
The other item to discuss is essence and form of studied data. At our classes, we widely use both textbook and various other sources such as TVprograms, computer programs, magazines, newspapers in our speaking practices and trainings. We deal with versatile formats of messages from textbook speaking assignments up to commercials and abstracts from a movie. Therefore, we can state that we base our speaking practice on discourse designated by linguists [2, 4, 5] as “относительно завершенное и связное коммуникативное событие в рамках языкового общения (как речевого, так и текстового)” [3, с.66]. The discourse encompassing all the speech peculiarities, complexities, deviations, slips of a tongue, etc and reflecting current live natural speech can be an ideal source for working on communicative competence of our students.
Висновок
Our observation on learning process of students proves high effectiveness of the set. Owing to the system of periodically giving speech training and using communicative approach to process the material, the teachers achieve formidable results in improvement of the students’ communicative skills. They have chances to further develop their foreign speech, to more thoroughly study the other people’s mentality, and to enhance their own level of communication practice. So after having finished the Language Leader set, the students demonstrate not only higher fluency in speech but changes in their overall communicative strategy.
Список використаних джерел
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- Дейк Т.А. Язык. Познание. Коммуникация. – М.: Прогресс, 1989. – 311с.
- Методика навчання іноземних мов у загальноосвітніх навчальних закладах: Підручник. Панова Л.С., Андрійко І.Ф. , Тезікова С.В. та інші. – К.: ВЦ «Академія», 2010. – 327с.
- Сусов И.П. Лингвистическая прагматика. – Винница, Нова Книга, 2009. – 272с.
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- Щукин А.Н.Обучение иностранным языкам. Теория и практика. – М: Филоматис, 2004. – 406с.
- Bryson, B. Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. – The USA: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1990. – 270 p.
- Cotton, D., Faklvey, D., Kent, S. Language Leader. Course Book. Intermediate. – Great Britain: Pearson Publishing House, 2008. – 202 p.
- Richards, J.C., Rodgers,T.S. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching.- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.