Педагогические науки/5. Современные методы преподавания

Бецько О.С.

Національний технічний університет України «Київський політехнічний інститут», Україна

Best practices on providing effective instructions for activities in English

The process of teaching English is difficult. It may be divided into components each representing the purposes of study: presentation and explanation of a new material; practice; assessment. In the classroom it is the teacher’s job to promote these three learning processes by the use of appropriate teaching acts. In this paper we would like to focus on presentation as a basis for the effectiveness of further activities. A teacher must present and explain new material in order to make it clear, comprehensible and available for learning. It is obvious that in order to learn something new our students need to be first able to perceive and understand it. One of the teacher’s jobs is to mediate such new material so that it appears in a form that is most accessible for initial learning.

When a teacher inputs new material he must provide the students with explicit descriptions or definitions of new ideas because it is the condition of success or failure of a lesson. Instruction (the directions given to introduce a learning task which activates independent student activity) is a type of explanation that is very important in teaching. The question of how to talk to students becomes important when teachers are giving their students instructions. Whatever the best activity you may choose it will be good for nothing if the students don’t know what you want them to do. Jeremy Harmer places emphasis on two general rules for giving instructions: “they must be kept as simple as possible, and they must be logical.” [1, p. 4]

Penny Ur in A Course in Language Teaching (1991) suggests the following guidelines for effective explanation and instruction:

1. Prepare. Some teachers think that they can improvise clear explanation. But experience shows that teachers’ explanations are often not as clear to their students as they are to themselves! It is worth preparing. A teacher must think for a while about the words to use, the illustrations to provide, writing these out, etc.

2. Make sure you have the class’s full attention. During language practice learners’ attention may sometimes dissipate. They can usually catch up with what they have missed later. But when the teacher is explaining something very important they must attend. This may be the only chance they have to get some vital information; if they miss some bits they may have difficulties later.

3. Present the information more than once. A repetition or paraphrase of the necessary information is important; a teacher must give the students more than one chance to understand what they have to do.

4. Be brief. Learners have only a limited attention span; they can’t listen to a teacher for very long at maximum concentration. A teacher must make his or her explanation as brief as possible, compatible with clarity.

5. Illustrate with examples. Very often a careful theoretical explanation is only perceived by an audience when made real through an example or better several. When giving instructions for an activity it often helps to demonstrate the activity yourself with the full class or with a volunteer student before inviting learners to complete the task on their own.

6. Get feedback. After finishing explanation a teacher must check with the class that they have understood. It is not enough to ask students whether they understood because they will sometimes say they did when in fact they didn’t out of politeness or unwillingness to lose face. It is better to ask them to do something that will show their understanding: to paraphrase in their own words, or provide further illustrations of their own [3, p.16 -17].

Scrivener in his work Learning Teaching. A guidebook for English language teachers (2005) provides five steps for giving better instructions. He suggests teachers to become aware of their own instruction- giving: “listen to yourself, record yourself, ask others to watch you and give feedback.” He also agrees on the preplanning essential instructions: “analyze the instructions beforehand so as to include the essential information in simple, clear language, and sequence it in a sensible order. Use short sentences – one sentence for each key piece of information. Don’t say things that are visible or obvious. Don’t give instructions that the students don’t need to know at this point. In class Scrivener advises to separate instructions clearly from other things that go on: “create a silence beforehand, make eye contact with as many students as possible, find an authoritative tone and make sure they are listening before you start. Use silence and gestures to place the instructions and clarify their meaning.” He claims: “demonstrate rather than explain wherever possible.” Finally, it is necessary to check that the students have understood what to do. “Don’t assume that everyone will automatically understand what you have said. Get concrete evidence from the students that they know what is required. Getting one or two students to tell you what they are going to do is one very simple way of achieving this [2, p. 90-92].

To sum up we’d like to say that people may perceive and even acquire new language without conscious presentation on the part of a teacher. We learn our first language like this. However, unmediated new input is often incomprehensible to learners, therefore it does not result in learning. The ability to mediate new material or instruct effectively is an essential teaching skill, it enables a teacher to facilitate learners’ understanding of new material, and thus promotes further learning.

Література:

1. Harmer, J. How to teach English. An introduction into the practice of English language teaching/ J.Harmer. – London: Longman, 1998. – P.4

2. Scrivener, J. Learning Teaching. A guidebook for English language teachers / J. Scrivener. – London: Macmillan, 2005. – P. 90-92 

3. Ur, P. A Course in Language Teaching. Practice and Theory. / P. Ur. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991. – P. 10-17