Магистрант Жұмабаева А.Р., к.п.н. Тургинбаева Л.В.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет, Казахстан

Южно-Казахстанский государственный педагогический институт, Казахстан

OPTIMIZATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING BY MEANS OF WEB 2.0 SOCIAL SERVICES

An age where the globalization of information and work is increasingly apparent, students are expected to have many new skills and abilities. In quickly developing countries such as Kazakhstan, much of the new skill emphasis relates to Information Technology and foreign languages, especially English. One solution is to embrace emerging social networking services such as wikis, shared online video, blogs in schools and to increase opportunities to communicate in English in various ways. Wikis allow people to easily write and edit on the Web. They are considered a new form of collaborative communication tool. The research explores the use of Wiki as a social networking service for improving students’ English writing skills.

Today’s students who might be afraid of using English are getting to know an innovative teaching and learning method, mainly performed online with materials they have built in a Wiki: not only a device for cooperative writing, but also a base of knowledge and information. Accordingly, when using a Wiki to teach, the teacher’s role changes to facilitator who must support students with timely and effective strategies that allow them to enjoy this activity.

The emergence of the Wiki, which has introduced a new way of interacting on the Web has made it possible to create and share information and knowledge in a more authentic way than before. Not only does Wiki technology foster communication among participants through writing, but it also facilitates important activities such as collaboration, reflection, and critical thinking for knowledge creation.

The results of experimental training support the assumption of our research that secondary school children’ writing skills through Wiki technology will be successful if it is based on the development and implementation of a following methodological aspects:

1) The content of writing skills teaching to children of secondary school consists of six components: lexical and grammatical, spelling and punctuation, stylistic, structural and organizational, socio-cultural and informative. Wiki technology allows us to develop the following schoolchildren’s writing skills: the ability to write business letters; the ability to write reports and massages; the ability to write reviews; the ability to write an essay (of a descriptive, narrative, argumentation, contrast-comparative kind); the ability to write short articles on the school and social themes.

2) Development of writing skills with schoolchildren based on Wiki technology will be effective if the development of relevant methodology will take into account, the following methodological settings: a) formation of ICT competence with schoolchildren up to the time of training; b) motivation of schoolchildren to participate in on-line learning by means of ‘cooperative learning’ technology; c) the use of assignments to work on the content, structure and language correctness of a collaborative Wiki document in the methodology; (d) the availability of the training algorithm.

3) Methodological system of writing skills building with secondary school students on the basis of Wiki technology is the unity of structural components consisting of four blocks: the target block (the target), the theoretical block (approaches and principles of learning); technology block (organizational forms, methods, means of education, training stages, methodological settings) and assessment and effective block (evaluation criteria and learning outcomes). It is impossible to implement the methodology without the algorithm of writing skills development with secondary school children through training Wiki technology which includes 3 stages and 10 steps: Stage I. Preparatory (installation and operation planning, familiarity with the rules of placement of information on Wiki document, introductory class); Stage II. Procedural (choice of themes and the creation of Wiki document, discussing and amending the text of Wiki document; network discussion of Wiki document); Stage III. Assessment (evaluation and self-assessment).