Normurodov Kamol,

the instructor of English,

Jizzakh state pedagogical institute, Uzbekistan

FORMULATING AND DEVELOPING ENGLISH GRAMMAR COMPETENCE

It is common knowledge that our country needs highly professional teachers of English. They must be good at both target language and its Methodology.

There is no doubt that communicative success may be achieved due to the appropriate level of grammar competence formation. But, unfortunately choosing a career adolescents tend to be influenced by external motivation. That is why only a few students of the pedagogical university have rather high level of professional competence formation.

Taking into consideration the age and psychological differences of the first year students we believe that teachers of Practical English Grammar may form professional grammar competence even in the target students of the pedagogical university.

Competence at issue has the following components: 1) linguistic competence which is presented in our investigation by grammar competence; 2) speech competence and 3) methodology competence.

Each of the competences consists of particular knowledge, skills and habits.

Grammar competence includes such skills as productive and receptive. As for grammar skills and knowledge of the first year students, one may find them in the Curriculum for English Language Development at Universities and Institutes.

Speech competence contains the students’ knowledge about: 1) speech registers with correspondent communicative behaviour; 2) different speech strategies. As for the skills and habits of the target language students can find them in the Curriculum as well.

Unfortunately, the first year students don’t have such a course as Foreign Language Teaching Methodology. Thus, the formation of methodology competence is imitative. It takes place during Practical English Grammar classes.

Therefore, the formation and development of the professional grammar competence in the first year students of the pedagogical university is realized through both classroom exercises and students’ imitation of their English Grammar teacher’s activity.

We are living in a dynamic and a fast-developing world, that is why we should take into account the modern approaches of teaching English. Nowadays, there are many different types and forms of teaching English but these diverse of approaches do not really include all the aspects which are needed for realization students’ potential.

The main task of teaching foreign languages is to teach students to use a language as a tool in a dialogue of cultures and civilizations of modern world. This aim includes communicative and socio-cultural development of students by the means of foreign languages, for preparing students to intercultural communication in different spheres of life. For this purpose we suggest using interactive methods which provide not only a high level of students’ knowledge but also a possibility to apply this knowledge in a daily life practice.

The main idea of this article is that grammar material used skillfully by a teacher can help to raise the interest of students to classes, it makes learning of structures of active and passive grammar minimum easier, and raises speaking and language competence.

Theoretical statements and examples of work on grammar structures with the help of interactive and non – standard methods are given in the work.

Resuming the results of the work we obtain the recommendations of effective usage of grammar in the process of foreign language studying, that is creating of manuals of new generation, grammar tasks of different levels, collection of grammar tasks for teaching in group work.

Grammar acquisition is increasingly viewed as crucial to language acquisition. However, there is much disagreement as to the effectiveness of different approaches for presenting vocabulary items. Moreover, learning grammar is often perceived as a tedious and laborious process. In this report I would like to examine some traditional techniques and compare them with the use of language games for grammar presentation and revision, in order to determine whether they are more successful in presenting and revising grammar than other methods.

From my teaching experience I have noticed how enthusiastic students are about practicing language by means of games. I believe that the grammar games are not only fun but they help students learn without a conscious analysis or understanding of the learning process while they acquire communicative competence as second language users.

There are numerous techniques concerned with grammar presentation. However, there are a few things that have to be remembered irrespective of the way new lexical items are presented. If teachers want students to remember new grammar it needs to be learnt in the context, practiced and then revised to prevent students from forgetting. Teachers must make sure that students have understood the new words, which will be remembered better if introduced in a ‘memorable way’. Bearing all this in mind, teachers have to remember to employ a variety of techniques for new grammatical presentation and revision.

Being analytical, English is conspicuously opposed to synthetic Ukrainian regarding the word-formation issues. The set of derivation techniques that can be found in English may rather often fail while applying to the appropriate Ukrainian equivalents and vice versa, thus creating extra difficulties for Ukrainian-speaking English learners. The word-formation type is treated in this respect as the means of managing all components of communicative competence on the derivational level due to its applicability to any typologically different languages.

The word-formation type is understood as an abstract constructional derivation unit that has the binary semantic structure ‘lexical meaning + derivational meaning’ and the formal structure ‘derivation base + formative’ and is used to form new words.

Traditionally, when dealing with the elements of the word-formation during the Grammar lessons, the teacher’s attention is primarily paid to enumerating productive and unproductive affixes. This approach neglects the tendency in English to the analytical words. The practical value of the applying the word-formation type notion is obvious, for instance, when to observe complex nouns (that number ca. 15% of all nouns in an English text!), like lake house, career woman, backstreet, delivery man, cross street etc. The notion of the word-formation type allows systematizing the language material paying equal attention to analytical word-formation types (e.g. noun + noun) and synthetic (e.g. noun + affix) ones.

Referring to the notion of the word-formation type can thus contribute to introducing fluency-aimed learning in meaningful communication, while compensating the insufficient competence in grammatical, discourse, strategic, or socio-cultural components of the communicative competence.

The communicative approach to the teaching of foreign languages is a very important method of teaching methodology. Teachers have to focus the teaching of the foreign language in the classroom in such a way that students can communicate in a conscious way, taking into account their real experiences.

The communicative approach could be said to be the product of educators and linguists who had grown dissatisfied with the audio-lingual and grammar-translation methods of foreign language instruction.

They felt that students were not learning enough realistic, whole language. They did not know how to communicate using appropriate social language, gestures, or expressions; in brief, they were at a loss to communicate in the culture of the language studied. Interest in and development of communicative-style teaching mushroomed in the 1970s; authentic language use and classroom exchanges where students engaged in real communication with one another became quite popular.

Communicative language teaching makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication. The teacher sets up a situation that students are likely to encounter in real life. Unlike the audio-lingual method of language teaching, which relies on repetition and drills, the communicative approach can leave students in suspense as to the outcome of a class exercise, which will vary according to their reactions and responses. The real-life simulations change from day to day. Students’ motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics.

Teachers in communicative classrooms will find themselves talking less and listening more – becoming active facilitators of their students’ learning. The teacher sets up the exercise, but because the students’ performance is the goal, the teacher must step back and observe, sometimes acting as referee or monitor.

LITERATURE

1. Azar B.S., Azar D.A. Fundamentals of English Grammar. Second Edition. -USA.: Longman, 1994.

2. Raymond Murphy. English Grammar in Use. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. 1995. -350 p.

3. Leech G., Stark S. Communicative Grammar of English. -
London.: 1975. – 136 c.

4. Quirk R et al. A University Grammar of English. -M.: Вьюшая школа, 1982. -391 p Reznik H. et al. A Grammar of the English Language. -M.: 1999.