Pedagogy/5. Up-to-date techniques of teaching

Cand. in Pedag.Sci., Associate Prof., Orynkul Zhumadillayeva

S.Seyfullin Agricultural University, Astana, Kazakhstan

 

Innovative Methods of Teaching a Foreign Language

in Technical Higher Schools

 

Innovative methods of teaching are a goal of many educators. At present the researches of pedagogical work show that teaching foreign languages is impossible without innovative component [1, 15]. In the light of modern requirements to the purposes of teaching a foreign language the status of both a student and a teacher changes; the scheme "Teacher – Student" passes into innovative technologies.

In technical higher schools foreign language teachers have to train a technician having a good command of a foreign language in a short space of time. It means to teach a student to tell, understand and extract different information from original sources for a limited period of time. And it is possible to realize by combining traditional and innovative methods of teaching, relying on the principles of communicative intercourse.

Traditional teaching a foreign language in technical higher schools was focused on reading, understanding, translating special texts and studying grammatical characteristics of scientific style.

Now the emphasis positively moved to the development of auditory communication skills and abilities. Oral speech includes listening or reading, understanding and reproductive rendering the listened or read material both in oral form (dialogue or monologue) and in writing.

Teaching oral speech by specialty is planned by taking into account the following states:  specifying the models of communication;  defining the communicative signs of oral speech and means of their expression;  comparison of means of expression and selection of models for passive and active use;  developing the system of exercises;  the analysis of texts focused on communication by specialty and development of effective system of exercises for training the selected structural units;  selection of the word-forming, lexical and grammatical structures necessary for reading, understanding, listening and speaking;  using the audio-and multimedia facilities for realizing oral communication [2,  158].

For realizing the communicative opportunities of speaking, texts are distinguished according to: the means of communication (oral and written); the way of a statement (describing, reporting and reasoning – summaries, reviews); a degree of relation to the special subject (research – monographs and scientific articles, and training – texts from textbooks, manuals and dictionaries).

It is necessary to begin with the elementary descriptions and characteristics, processing them in a monologic form, and then to use more complicated on structure and style texts that will help to form students’ activity algorithm in the mode of communication of Teacher/Audio and multimedia means – Student and Student – Student.  The teaching material must be professionally relevant with a glance of the students’ prerequisite knowledge of language and special subject, purpose and type of communication, as well as a grade level.

The exercises communicative oriented to oral speech should include the following:  the availability of an initial material or model; model imitation; model rendering in a variety of ways; own communication.  The main thing is to be able to single out the main subject of a problem, to describe, formulate and assert correctly [3, 15].

In developing the skills of oral speech it should be necessary to increase gradually the extent of a monological reply in a dialogue and then  to pass to merely monological forms of the oral speech – summary, abstract, annotation, description of the scheme, occurrence or process with further writing.

Thereby, innovative technologies of teaching foreign languages in a technical higher school consist in a combination of traditional and intensive methods of the teaching based on functional and communicative linguistic-didactic model of language, and development of integral system of teaching communication on shop talk.

Today, when computer technologies spread to all spheres of human activity, there is a necessity of improving a foreign language teaching process as mastering a foreign language is one of the factors influencing on competitiveness of young specialists in the world labour-market.

The variety of information resources of the Internet enables students to carry out different tasks of searching and investigative work.

In addition, the Internet gives students a unique opportunity of visual communication with native speakers on a real-time basis that promotes the correct perception of the real speech on the basis by the authentic sounds, a mimicry and gesticulation.  One more advantage of using the Internet in the course of teaching is checking the students’ learning the material by means of testing on a real-time basis.

The teacher should motivate a student not only to use up-to-date innovative technologies in doing some tasks, but also to apply these technologies actively by improving his professional skill.

Bibliography

1. Christensen, R. (1998).  Effect of technology integration education on the attitudes of teachers and their students. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Texas. Retrieved on 12 April, 2014, from http://www.tcet.unt.edulresearch/dissert/rhondac.

2. Андронкина Н.М. Проблемы обучения иноязычному общению в преподавании иностранного языка как специальности // Обучение иностранным языкам в школе и вузе. СПб.,2001. С.150-160

3. Комарова Э.П. Структурно – композиционные характеристики научного текста //Новейшие методы преподавания иностранного языка студентам неязыковых специальностей вуза / М.: МГУ, 1991. С.15