Article deals with the issues of organizing communication in foreign language classroom. Communication is the basis of human existence. No one doubts the meaning of communication in a foreign language in the life of modern society. The current international situation has predetermined the direct implementation of economic, political and scientific-technical ties, accompanied by significant growth and expansion of cultural and business contacts. In the conditions of foreign language communication in the modern world, a foreign language is not only a means of receiving, transmitting and accumulating information, but also serves to establish contact and mutual understanding between interlocutors. All this made new demands on foreign language proficiency and thus determined the nature of the methods used in teaching communication in foreign languages.
Keywords: communication, speech, situation, foreign language.
The main purpose of a foreign language as a subject area of school education is to master the ability of students to communicate in a foreign language. When teaching foreign language proficiency in the framework of a secondary school, teachers face the problem of the mismatch of the methods used in teaching modern requirements for mastering a foreign language. The problem of creating conditions in the classroom, close to real communication, remains one of the most pressing problems in modern methods of teaching foreign languages. An analysis of the literature indicates that many experts in the field of teaching foreign languages are engaged in the study of this problem: new methods, technologies and techniques are being developed to enhance the educational and cognitive activity of students, discusses strategies and tactics of interpersonal interaction.
Modern methods of teaching foreign languages is the science of how, by managing academic communication, prepare students for real communication with native speakers. The process of learning foreign language communication is built in accordance with the laws of real communication and is its model. “Creating a learning process means simulating the basic, fundamentally important parameters of communication, which include: the personal nature of the communicative activity of the subject of communication, mutual understanding and interaction of speech partners, the situation as a form of functioning of communication, the substantive basis of the communication process, a system of speech means, the assimilation of which would ensure communicative activity in communication situations, the functional nature of the assimilation and use of speech means, novelty of communication” [1].
Taking into account the above parameters of real communication in the learning process allows the teacher not only to solve educational and educational tasks, but also to develop the abilities of students, which is especially important at the middle level of education, which bears the main burden in shaping the skills of direct communication with a partner. His task is to teach interaction in the context of the joint implementation of any activity, self-expression and interaction in the framework of interpersonal relations.
Today, as the ultimate goal of learning is considered “the ability to use a foreign language in a real situation of communication to achieve mutual understanding of communicants” [2, p.288].
The learning-speech situation is the conditions set by the teacher that are necessary for the student to perform the speech action in accordance with the intended communicative task. The effectiveness of situations in training depends on the exact focus on a specific task, on its accessibility for the student, on meeting his interests and needs, his individual characteristics, his age. In determining the nature of the situations against which speech activity should proceed, the teacher should take into account the age characteristics of the psyche, norms, traditions and rules of behavior, the nature of needs and motives, life experience, students' plans for the future.
The student act in the proposed circumstances, using foreign language means, he must have experience of acting in similar circumstances in his native language. So, to find out which of the proposed situations pupils are interested in and give an opportunity to talk, let's turn to an analysis of the age characteristics of adolescent students, which corresponds to the average level of education. Psychologically, this age is extremely controversial. These are students who are dependent on their parents and their main activity is learning. The most important psychological state is the sense of adulthood represents a new level of aspirations, anticipating the future situation, which the student has not yet actually reached. Hence, the typical age-related conflicts and their refraction in the adolescent self-consciousness. Special attention in this deserves communication with peers. Comrades are in many ways closer to him than older ones; relations with them become more complicated, more diverse and more meaningful than those of younger schoolchildren, go beyond the school, and include new interests and activities. The adolescent clearly shows the desire to be accepted, recognized, respected among peers, to participate in joint activities with them. The knowledge of such features of psychology can assist the teacher in the selection and distribution of the roles of both positive and negative characters. Attention to the problems of communication characteristic of adolescents can be used by organizing indicative activities related to entering the situation. What he follows, without sometimes realizing, the criteria that he himself uses will become actual for him to be aware of, and this may be the key to the success of situational-organized speech communication. An analysis of the characteristics of communication in adolescence leads to the conclusion that it is most likely possible to interest a teenager with interpersonal types of communication.
It is very important that the situation puts the student in front of such problems that he has to solve in life and which correspond to his desire for self-affirmation, self-expression.
For example, consider the situation:
Raleigh — father (mother), son (daughter);
Conditions — parents do not let go to camp, trip with class,
Purpose:
a) convince parents of their independence and readiness;
b) point out to the child his weaknesses and the difficulties that await him;
Options — conditions and place of travel, its participants;
Grammar material — degrees of comparison;
Vocabulary — words that characterize personality traits, verbs — to be able to know.
At the middle level of learning, almost all language materials intended for productive learning are mastered. And all this material needs to be skipped through learning and speech situations. This is the heyday of situational-oriented learning. When planning situational exercises at this stage, it is especially important to ensure consistency in their use.
Using teaching and speech situations in my practice, I was convinced of their effectiveness. They contribute to the introduction of a new atmosphere of creativity, creativity, create an interesting, exciting atmosphere in the classroom, which does not leave students indifferent and contributes to the growth of students' speech activity. It should be noted that poorly performing students involved in a specific situation cannot remain indifferent.
In preparation for the lessons, I take into account the multi-level training of students and pre-divide students, taking into account their psychological compatibility, into subgroups in which there are both weak and strong students. This division has a positive side: first, weak learners are drawn to stronger ones; secondly, strong students, helping the weak, reinforce their knowledge.
The use of situations of communication in the classroom requires the teacher to be creative in organizing this type of activity. In fact, only interesting and interesting material is remembered, otherwise there will be a decrease in the interest of students and their activity in the classroom.
Let’s give an example of a specific use of the situation in the classroom.
The topic of the lesson is “My house”. Here you can suggest a situation of searching for a missing item managed by one of the elders. For example, a mother cannot find a book in her place. This situation teaches us to use the torsion there is / there are, prepositions under, in, on, verb to look, turns Where is my.., I cant find it. Based on this situation, a dialogue is possible, including tips to look under the bed, in the closet, etc., as well as questions and answers that clarify the appearance of the missing book. But, in order to approach this situation, a lot of work in the lesson on vocabulary and grammatical structure is there / there are.
Consider another situation.
The topic of the lesson is “Welcome to Astana”. When reviewing homework, students were introduced to the following situation. A group of students from one of the states of America should come to school. They should be introduced to the sights of Astana. The students were given the text as information, which is reported by the guide-translators. The students were assigned the following tasks [3]:
- To select the most interesting facts and characteristics from the information and mark the sequence of their submission in the message in order to learn how to prepare their own in the future.
- Prepare questions that you think the excursionists interested in additional information could ask the guide.
- Prepare this kind of information at home.
In class, students worked in psychologically compatible groups. The effectiveness of the lesson was high; the students had no particular difficulty in communicating, as they often encounter such a situation on tourist trips.
Teaching and speech situations can be used in various types of speech activity in the classroom. “For educational purposes, proficiency should always be considered in terms of the ability to participate in real communication, but not in terms of knowledge of individual language elements” [4, p.215]. And if we create an atmosphere in the classroom that is close to real, which facilitates communication in a foreign language, then the use of learning and speech situations is the best way possible for teaching oral speech in a foreign language.
Thus, everything that in a learning environment may turn out to be in the learner related to the need to perform a learning task should be recognized as an obstacle to the creation of a natural speech situation; and, conversely, the more the teacher succeeds in distracting the tutor at the moment from the directly learning behavior, the more guaranteed success is in creating a natural speech situation.
In order to bring the educational speech situations conditions as close as possible to the conditions of real communication and thus prepare students for possible URS in their subsequent life, it is necessary to identify the main features of real communication. The analysis shows that there are three such features:
– real life circumstances;
– the speakers are interested in the content of the conversation “in receiving information;
– the need to have a conversation in a foreign language — otherwise the information cannot be obtained.
Let us give an example of such a situation: being in a foreign country, a person searches the city for the street where his hotel is located (walked and got lost), he has to turn to passersby, ask them questions, listen and understand their answers, use speech clichés.
So, the first thing to take care of when developing educational speech situations is the reality of the situation. For example, you can use such tasks: “Tell us about a planned trip” or “Play a dialogue between a passerby or a policeman and a tourist” [5].
Students need to be able to imagine themselves in a certain role, as well as the desire to participate in a kind of game, necessary to master a foreign language. They must learn to invent the content of an imaginary conversation.
Closer to real communication are those educational speech situations in which the content of the speech does not need to be invented and you do not need to imagine yourself in someone else's role. These are tasks that are addressed to the student; involve the use of his life experience. For example, it is proposed to talk about your family or your hobbies. Such tasks are good because they are personal in nature and allow for some variety of content — one has brothers and sisters, another has none, one loves skiing, the other skates or computer games. However, although the content of the speech has not been invented, the situation does not quite meet the conditions of real communication, since what is being reported is known, there is no novelty in it that could be of interest. The content is known not only to the person who communicates it, but also to those who listen, the students in the class know everything about each other. However, to cause an emotional attitude in this case can not the content of speech, but the fact of speech in a foreign language. Such an attitude is characteristic of the initial stage of training, but cannot serve as a stimulus for advanced students [6].
The situation can be turned so that the conversation went with a new student enrolled in this class. Then questions about his hobbies will be more justified and it is advisable to entrust them to students. If it is said that the new student is a foreigner, then the third condition will be met — the need for a conversation in a foreign language. Although such a situation is possible in real life, in our case, this is not a life situation, but a learning situation: a newcomer-foreigner is invented and someone must think up answers to it. The real situation will become if a foreign student really falls into our school. But nowadays there are so many opportunities to contact foreigners: the Internet, Skype, social networks are only part of the opportunity I mentioned above. If you contact a foreign student on Skype, then you can create an environment of the real situation in the classroom.
Communication with a native speaker is a great way to learn and improve a language. Returning to the question of the naturalness of educational speech situations, we note that we can bring them closer to the conditions of real communication, not only due to the vitality of the situation, but also by increasing the novelty of information, arousing interest in it. So, by organizing a discussion in the lesson of any exciting schoolchildren events, we can count on their interest in the content of the conversation. For example, on March 19, president was changed in the Republic of Kazakhstan, which caused mixed assessments. I began the lesson not with the current material, but with the fact that I express my opinion and offer those who wish to speak or even argue with each other. If, in the heat of discussion, someone switches to their native language, I remind you that they are in the classroom and they need to speak this language; I tell them the words and expressions they lack. Along the way, let me remind you that when you perform speech tasks you should not stop to parse language errors; you just need to fix them. If any mistake is repeated, take notes of it and conduct the necessary exercises in subsequent lessons.
To interest students, the teacher must from time to time tell them about something interesting (sometimes even intriguing). He begins the story and stops at the most interesting place. Students have to ask him questions in order to find out what happened next. Approximate beginnings of such a story: “Today a bird flew into my...” Possible questions: “What bird?”, “Did you catch it?”, “What happened next?”, Etc. A lively dialogue is possible, however, only if the teacher always answers the questions of the students, encourages questions, if a relaxed atmosphere is created in the classroom. Unexpected teacher stories about themselves contribute to the creation of such an environment. But do not turn it into a stencil; the age characteristics of students must be also taken into account.
References:
- Ibatova, Aygul Z., et al. «Using Interdisciplinary Integration in Teaching English of Oil and Gas Students in Russia». International Journal of Environmental and Science Education11.15 (2016): 8055–8061.
- Malyuga, E. N. «Individual-oriented training in professional communication teaching». ICERI 8 (2015): 4807.
- House, Juliane. Translation as communication across languages and cultures. Routledge, 2015.
- Bambaeeroo, Fatemeh, and Nasrin Shokrpour. «The impact of the teachers’ non-verbal communication on success in teaching». Journal of advances in medical education & professionalism 5.2 (2017): 51.
- Kurmantayeva, U. K., A. K. Ospanova, and E. O. Akkerman. «Situations as a type of speech activity in foreign language lessons». ББК 72+ 74.58 М63 Editorial Board: Mishchenko ES–Doctor of Economics, Professor, Vice Rector for International Relations, Tambov State Technical University, Tambov (2019): 266.
