Филологические науки / 3.Теоретические и методологические проблемы исследования языка

Pochynok L. І., Zabolotnyi К. F.

Bucovinian State Medical University

OPTIMIZING THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS AS AN IMPORTANT MEANS IN EFFICIENT TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The idea of optimizing takes into account the requirements of the philosophical category of proportion. Without adhering to a sense of proportion while using one or another method, means, ways of teaching, forms of the organization of teaching, hyperbolization or an underestimation of those or other components of the teaching process takes place and it becomes non-optimal for corresponding conditions. Therefore, systematization, specific character and proportion make up three most important methods of logical substantiations of optimization.

In order to organize an optimal process of teaching it is necessary to have a profound knowledge of its principal forms, regularities and principles of its adequate functioning, possess a technique of choosing optimal decisions. In search of new forms of teaching the idea of optimizing the procedure of teaching has become one of the leading ones.

The essence of the process of optimization consists in discovering the extremum or a choice of the optimal variant out of enormous quantity of possible variants. The very notion “the process of optimization“ implies a choice and realization of a system of measures enabling an educational specialist to obtain any, not merely good or better than before results, but the highest possible ones for specific conditions, without overworking both a teacher and a student over an allotted term of education in conformity with a set goal. To identify the notion “optimal“ with the notion “rational“, “updated“, “modernized“, “ideal“, “effective“, “intensive“, as it sometimes happens in methodological literature, is inadmissible.

Optimization is a phenomenon qualitatively distinctive from all others and envisages an increase in efficiency not by any means, but by the most advantageous complex of means for a specific situation. As distinct from all other notions mentioned above optimization envisages without fail the presence of criteria owing to which optimality of achieved results is established.

Since “optimal“ means “the best from the point of view of certain criteria“, it is necessary to determine precise specific criteria owing to which optimality of the system of the means of teaching or education proposed will be evaluated. Such optimization criteria may be:

1) maximally possible results in developing knowledge abilities, skills, one or another feature of an individual;

2) minimum time necessary for students and teachers to achieve certain results;

3) minimally necessary efforts of both students and teachers to achieve certain results over an allotted period of time;

4) minimum number of methods as compared with the typical ones to achieve certain results over an allotted period of time;

There aren’t any particular criteria of optimality which would always meet the requirements of every teacher. It is possible to optimize the teaching procedure according to one or two of these criteria, let’s assume, through maximally possible result and minimally necessary time spent by students.

Efficacy and quality of solving teaching-educative tasks, as well as the expense of time and efforts of both educationalists and students, for their solution should be regarded as the most important criteria of optimality of the teaching process under the conditions of a higher school.

At the present stage of teaching a foreign language the process of optimization is based on the following principles: communicative orientation; oral principles of teaching; situational-thematic organization; intensification of the teaching process; a differentiated approach to teaching types of speech activity.

The principle of communicativeness is the leading one, when teaching a foreign language. The attention of both an instructor and a student should be concentrated on forming skills of using lexical and grammatical structures in conventional or real situations, in other words, the entire language material should be learnt through communication, and a dialogue between a teacher and a student is founded on the basis of students’ life experience, their counterparts of the same age abroad, in situations connected with the country’s history, its contemporaneity. The closer an educational situation to reality is, the more actively students enter into a conversational intercourse. The principle of an approach to foreign language teaching based on oral speech predomination envisages an activation of selected educational material. Firstly, in oral form (listening comprehension, speaking) and later on in reading and writing. Thus, this approach guarantees a mastery of all types of speech activity in the following succession: listening comprehension –– speaking –– reading.

The principle of a differentiated approach in teaching is implemented via an increasing level of the difficulty of exercises, while teaching listening comprehension. Mastering the skills of communication is implemented in class in the forms of a dialogic and monologic intercourse. The principal task in reading is forming habits and skills of reading and comprehending an unknown text, reading aloud being one of the teaching techniques.

The principle of a situational-thematic organization of the spoken material envisages its selection and distribution for learning and mastering under the conditions maximally approximated to real ones. The types of utterances are stipulated by certain situations, interlocutors’ interrelations being revealed therein. The character of a situation (the place, time, subject of the conversation, the form of communication, the type of speech information) influences on the choice of speech units, therefore a situational-thematic organization of the teaching material is one of the essential manifestations of the principle of communication.

The principle of intensification of the teaching procedure consists in raising the productivity of work in class. Intensification is attained via combining an individual, paired, group, choral types of work, the use of the distributing material, a wide use of the handout, technical teaching aids and the elements of programming. The teacher is able to construct an optimal version out of those available, selecting separate parts or elements, or combining them.

Mastering the technique of optimal organization of the teaching process or its parts develops a teacher’s creativity without fail. From the positions of optimization the first step of a teacher, when planning a class, is acquiring the skill to see different variants of solving one or another task, irrespective of concrete conditions.

The next step is choosing the best one of them in accordance with the personality features of a teacher, specific characteristics of an academic group and other specific conditions.

Such a choice is a creative operation, and it itself is the basis of optimization of the teaching process. A selection of the most adequate teaching methods for a specific class is one of the central points of optimizing the teaching procedure.