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Taganrog Institute of Management and Economics, Russia

 

Psychological and pedagogical features of students’ and teachers’ interacting in the course of research work

 

The success of foreign language learning depends on a number of factors. One of the most important of them is the students’ self-organized research activity. Consequently, the task of the teacher is not only to transfer the amount of his/her own knowledge to students but also in shaping their skills of self-organization and self-knowledge acquisition.

Organization of this activity involves the management of students’ self-activity and joint teachers’ and students’ creative work, which is implemented through properly organized system of communication. There are two organizational options: direct and indirect impacts to control this activity. Direct control is carried out through the contacts during the classroom work.  Indirect control is carried out through the use of special educational materials and guidelines for working with them. Organization of such interaction involves the use of student-oriented, communicative-directed approach to learning foreign languages.

As a second component to create a communicative-enabling environment is the organization of incentives. The content of educational process acts as the most important and meaningful stimulus.  The content of training includes all language and speech materials necessary for the formation of linguistic and communicative competence in various fields of communication, including future professional activity. When sorting out the content of training of teachers must be aware of the following requirements:

- the set of methodical works, which includes training material at different levels must be strictly consistent with the objectives of training in a particular school and it must meet the needs of learners;

- the complex of training materials should cover all aspects of the language; new language material must be entered clearly; training of the new language material should be carried out thoroughly;

- the time of training should match the educational objectives and should be individually differentiated, the pace should be neither too fast nor too slow;

- the repetition of the material and monitoring learning outcomes must be thorough and regular;

- the content of the textbook materials should be informative, interesting, illustrated - so that it could be easy to work with;

- the training complex should be provided with a sufficient number of guidelines for teachers and students for the successful use of this educational material;

- the methodical complex assumes the obligation to provide students with directories, various dictionaries;

- the methodical complex also requires proving students with materials for  reading, allowing them to expand their vocabulary and grammar through practical use of the language.

Students’ self-activity is manifested in mastering language skills, mastery of language lexical and grammatical operations, reading comprehension and cognitive actions performed on the basis of cross-cultural and general cultural information. Significant result of this activity for students is application of this knowledge and skills in their professional activities. Methodically-significant terms of the effectiveness of cognitive student’s self-activity when learning a foreign language are:

-  creation of psychologically comfortable conditions for joint activities;

- intensification and optimization of the educational process to convert it into the creative process;

- enrichment of the learning process through various means of communication, computer technology;

- construction of educational environment so that this environment would act as a society;

- widespread use of high-tech equipment and systems of communication, reference books, etc.

The system of organizing students’ self-activity generates a lot of questions, and among them there is a very essential question of the criteria for its evaluation. Many researchers suggest a classification of such criteria based on different grounds. It is generally accepted to consider both quantitative and qualitative criteria. There is also a system of evaluation of students’ self-activity in the unity of these characteristics. We believe that such a division is essential, but not sufficient. We suppose that both objective and subjective criteria should be considered. With regard to the conditions of the system for assessing the effectiveness of students’ self-activity they were divided into five groups, taking into account: recognition; informativeness; promising; prioritize work; fruitful influence on the personality

In general, the identified criteria can help determine the level of students’

success and to define measures to improve their activity. Development of students’ cognitive activity requires a comprehensive approach to the problem, taking into account the psychological, social and didactic aspects.

References:
1. European Language Portfolio. Proposals for Development - Council of Europe.

 Strasburg, February 1997.
2. Kuzmina NV "Methods of pedagogical research system." Tutorial - A: LSU, 1980.