Àõìåòîâà À.Å.
Ìåæäóíàðîäíûé êàçàõñêî-òóðåöêèé óíèâåðñèòåò
èì.À.ßñàâè
TO THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL APPROACH IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Gradual sophistication in the “global” industry of
learning and teaching English created a lot of new dimensions in EFLT
methodology. Today no one argues that EFL should not be taught as a formal
linguistic system; it should be reoriented from knowledge-centered to
culture-centered reflecting the socio-cultural reality, where the learners are
to express and develop themselves. The main idea of this approach is not only
personality enrichment by images of modern polyphonic world and ability to
master all its diversity, but also the strengthening of in-depth fundamentals
of the personality closely connected with the national culture and perception
of universal spiritual values.
In the design of EFL education and instruction, the
question arises of how much and what kind of attention to devote to
pronunciation. This paper proposes and highlights a socio-cultural approach to
teaching EFL pronunciation in the context of FL teacher training.
The peculiarity of teaching foreign language
pronunciation (FLP) is that it takes place on the basis of the native language
and culture, which determine the formation of FL skills and habits. “If a
foreign language is acquired more successfully in parallel with the development
of the native language skills, then the entry to the world of a foreign culture
can promote to a higher degree the learner’s personality development as the
subject of native culture” [Ïàññîâ 1998, 19].
Pronunciation is always socially oriented testifying
to its deep-rooted links to culture. It is vocalized in communication and can
be considered as the voice of culture. In the process of speech acts, the man,
interpreting and estimating spiritual experience of generations, builds up
his/her individual cultural space “modus vivendi”. This cultural space contains
the system and hierarchy of values, the subjective estimates, and ways of
attitudinal expressions and interpretations of events. The way we vocalize our
thoughts directly corresponds both to an immediate situation, and to the entire
context of culture, its values.
Besides, pronunciation as the vocal part of speech is
most personalized; the man subconsciously controls pronunciation features of
speech for reaching communicative goals. Thus, pronunciation is a means of
realization of a personal communicative intention. Pronunciation characterizes
a person not only in terms of his/her education and origin, but also in terms
of his/her self-rating and social claims, it determines what role he/she claims
in the eyes of other people. It is an in-depth component and a sign of the
man’s personality.
An FL teacher-professional should understand all this
and have an ability to feel the cultural background of vocalic speech and to
transmit it to the learners for its adequate reception and interpretation.
No doubt, he/she should also possess perfect FLP
skills permitting to understand fluent FL speech, employ various intonational
styles, adapt pronunciation features according to the communicative situation,
etc. not only on empirical, but also on linguistic basis. At the same time,
he/she must be capable of pedagogically competent presentation of this or that
language phenomenon in class: slow down, if necessary, the tempo of speech,
increase its volume, emphasize the intonation, exaggerate the articulation
providing the desirable educational and pragmatic effect on the learner. As we
see, it presupposes a wider set of problems and aspects of FLP teaching,
exceeding the level of simple mastering of its linguistic component.
Is an FL teacher ready to face these new challenges in
teaching of FLP according to the modern demands?
The attempt to tackle this problem has been made in an
elective course “EFL Professional Teaching Rhetoric”, which was taught for the
fourth-year students of the Department of the English Language at
-national spiritual heritage;
-language traditions;
-communicative individualities formed in the native
language
-pedagogically significant teaching skills.
According to the cognitive model we defined the first
stage of teaching professional rhetoric as a sensitivity stage,
when the students do not yet imitate the teaching communicative behavior. They
learn to see meaning in speech sounds patterning and respond to its
modifications: they form an image of pronunciation style of the teacher, the
outline of pronunciation system in action.
By this time the students have already subconsciously
acquired communicative images of professional teaching rhetoric in L1 through
their experience in class as students and teaching assistants. They have
already gained some individual L1 communicative experience and have a store of
images, concepts, knowledge of acceptable communicative behavior in class and
in a variety of culture bound situations. Thus they have already formed their
communicative imagination in L1. We just help them to shape and develop
awareness of it by the so-called sensory attack.
After this the students are shown some fragments from
the well-known American films: “Dead Poets Society”, “Teachers”, “Clueless”.
Each fragment is followed by the teacher’s questions highlighting various
rhetorical parameters of the professional speech.
-How do Math and Chemistry teachers introduce their
subjects?
-What phonostylistic characteristic do they use to
make their speech imposing and effective?
-What does Mr.Keeting want to achieve?
-How does he achieve the effect of his speech being
arresting, thrilling, absorbing for the students. Why are the students carried
along by his speech?
-What’s the difference between the teaching
communicative behavior of the Science and Humanities teachers? Are they
opposed? How is this opposition characterized in phonological terms?
·
Do they differ in
intonation, timber or tempo? How does the timber of their voice different?
·
What makes the voice of
the Math and Chemistry teachers more categorical, imperative, patronizing?
·
What makes the voice of
the Literature teacher sound persuasive, echoing, challenging, genuinely
concerned, powerful and emotional?
·
What shouldn’t the
teacher do to sound unpleasant and boring?
The students don’t try to imitate teaching rhetoric
yet; they just describe it from different angles answering the questions. They
collect more and more images of teaching communicative behavior in class, and
gradually develop their own cognitive instruments sizing up this or that
teaching rhetoric and style. The presented authentic materials are redundant
and diverse to ensure the students’ sufficient accumulation of culture-bound
communicative images.
The polyphonic images of various samples of teacher’s
L1 and FL communicative behavior are stored to be later used as patterns for
the communicative behavior in class.
The second stage is operational, where
the students generalize and verbalize the accumulated communicative images.
Here the students imitate the discussed and acquired subconsciously patterns of
the teachers’ communicative behavior. Now they develop the ability to
empirically assess and approximate the EFL speech authentic parameters, shaping
their individual instruments of FL phonological analysis, specifying FLP
characteristics for phonologically, socially and culturally acceptable
performance in class. The students at this stage are given scripts of the fragments
they have seen and asked to perform the following tasks trying their best to
imitate the speech pragmatic characteristics of the teachers from the films.
-Read the teacher’s speech samples observing the
melody and intonation style. Try your best to demonstrate the same pragmatic
characteristics of their speech.
-Read a phrase and then say it without reference to
the text using adequate gestures and mimics.
If the students do not feel confident at the second
stage, they are offered to watch and to comment on the film fragments again.
The third stage is analytical where the
students further specify the acquired communicative images at the basis of
conscious phonological analysis of the professional teaching rhetoric. Here the
future EFL teachers train to be consciously aware of the phonological
modifications of the teacher’s speech and to make comments on these
modifications in linguistic terms. Assessing various pragmatic characteristics
of the professional teaching rhetoric they learn to control their speech and to
adjust it to the pedagogical situation in class. Their tasks would be as
follows:
-Comment on your fellow-student’s reading from the
point of view of teaching methodology. Assess the phonological and
socio-cultural characteristics of the speech.
-How would you instruct your students to read this
text accordingly? What phonostylistic parameters would you draw their attention
to?
The fourth-year students are already quite capable of
assessing phonological characteristics of speech, so this stage could be
incorporated into the second stage. The point is to make sure that the students
are confident in analyzing the phonological characteristics of the given speech
fragments and know how to monitor them for the desired pedagogical and rhetoric
effect.
The last stage is creative rhetoric development achieved
by spontaneous activation of the accumulated images and their adjustment to the
individual communicative means. This stage is aimed to demonstrate how the
students can make use of their teaching rhetoric as speech pragmatics, how they
can manipulate various forms of speech effects. They are asked to prepare a
short fragment of the teacher’s speech (5-7 phrases):
-Speak persuasively about the necessity to learn
English.
-Motivate the students to read the text about
-Encourage the students to do the homework. Make them
be interested in making stories about their hobbies, school, etc.
-Present the grammar theme conveying personal
involvement.
-Challenge the students giving them a test (a difficult
task, etc).
-Inspire the students to dramatize a dialogue.
-Explain giving examples how to use The Present Simple
Tense.
-Instruct the students how to do the exercise (filling
in the blanks).
Performing these tasks the students develop the
ability to operate the entire parameters of pronunciation system using
communicative imagination. If they successfully coped with these and previous
tasks, they are offered to prepare a lecture on teaching rhetoric with
examples, where they can sum up their knowledge and skills to monitor and
adjust their speech to various socio-cultural situations.
By the end of the course the students develop their
individual instruments of EFLP acquisition and instruction, sufficiently
develop their communicative imagination and professional rhetorical skills. The
course proves to be effective allowing to implement the dialog of cultures in
the process of EFL teacher education and providing the gradual growth of the
overall EFL teacher’s proficiency.
Literature:
1. Dulay, H., Burt, M., Krashen, S. (1982). Language
Two.
2. Pavlova S.V. (2000) Contemporary Issues in Teaching
Phonetics and Pronunciation.
3. Ãîëîâèí
Á.Í. Îñíîâû êóëüòóðû ðå÷è. Ì., 1988.
4. Ìèõàëüñêàÿ
À.Ê. Ïåäàãîãè÷åñêàÿ ðèòîðèêà: èñòîðèÿ è òåîðèÿ. Ì., èçä.öåíòð Àêàäåìèÿ, 1998.
5. Ïàññîâ
Å.È. Êîíöåïöèÿ âûñøåãî ïðîôåññèîíàëüíîãî ïåäàãîãè÷åñêîãî îáðàçîâàíèÿ. Ëèïåöê,
1998.