Педагогические науки/ 2. Проблемы подготовки специалиста
Николаенко О.В.,
Ушатая Т.А.
Черниговский государственный институт экономики и управления
TEXTS
SELECTING CRITERIA WHILE TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES
Drastic changes
in political, social and economic, and cultural life of Ukraine, which are
connected with the processes of globalization and informatization, inevitably
lead to reconsideration of objectives and content of teaching foreign languages
at non-linguistic higher educational establishments. Expansion of international
contacts gives an opportunity of information and experience exchange among the
members of different cultures not only in everyday life matters, but also in professional
activity ones. Thus, it’s difficult to overestimate the importance of teaching
different kinds of foreign language performance, professional reading in
particular.
The process of
reading is very complicated and multicomponent in itself, as to understand and
analyze the information of the text a student should use the knowledge of a
foreign language grammar, should be able to identify the topic, the author’s
message, to apply a habit of compensating the lack of understanding of some
text segments using the context.
So, a text is a
source of language and speech material, a means of communication skills
formation, a sample of a certain type of written speech activity which is used
as a basis for making own statement and also as a source of information.
Thus, texts
selecting is of paramount importance. Teaching materials selection should be
made in such a way, that they could satisfy the existent students’ interests,
their desire to get the most interesting, urgent and professionally significant
information. Selecting criteria should take into account the structure of a
particular speciality, i.e. the correlation of the constituent academic
disciplines, and their connection with the future professional activity.
The first
criterion that should be considered is professional activity, special
orientation of text information. This criterion reflects future scopes of
activity, situations of professional communication and also professionally
significant subject area. In compliance with this criterion texts should be
oriented on the future professional activity. The information acquired from the
texts is necessarily involved in the process of communication on the scientific
or production-practical subject area within professional communication sphere.
Since in the
process of teaching foreign languages we form the students’ ability to use the
language in real everyday life, the academic texts should be authentic. So the
next criterion of selecting professionally oriented texts is the authenticity
of sources. An authentic text is an original text, taken from the foreign
sources of information, created by native-speakers and primarily not meant for
teaching purposes. In the texts being selected such features as coherence,
integrity, information saturation, correspondence to logical-composition and
logical-semantic features should be preserved. In terms of language aspects,
academic texts should correspond to modern lexical and grammatical language
standards. While teaching the authentic texts reading the level of students’
cognitive processes participation increases, thinking and such intelligence
operations as analysis and synthesis in particular. So the ability to read
authentic texts has a great educational and developmental potential.
One more
important criterion is the cooperation of the profession with other sciences
and branches of knowledge. It’s generally known that all sciences use actual
data and analysis of other sciences. Related sciences and branches facilitate
understanding if the data is provided in an accessible way.
Especially
important is such criterion as taking into account the level of students’ professional
and language background. It greatly influences the successfulness of teaching
reading professionally oriented foreign texts.
It’s clear that
studying special literature should be motivated. Students will be interested in
reading such literature, which satisfies their cognitive needs, i.e.
corresponds their professional interests. And here there is one more problem.
The majority of Ukrainian higher educational establishments start teaching
special subjects only to third-year students. Teaching foreign languages for
specific purposes starts from the first year of study. The disagreement of
these terms creates additional problems while selecting professional texts for
reading. A foreign language teacher should take into account the fact that the
majority of students will learn some professional terms or phenomena for the
first time, moreover in a foreign language. So, it’s necessary to select such
texts that are within students’ abilities. It concerns not only professional
vocabulary, but also lexical and grammatical difficulties.
It means that we
should use the criterion of intensification of difficulties. By professional
simplicity we understand a certain succession of presenting special information
according to the principle “from the simple to complicated”.
Having analyzed
the methodological literature we’ve come to conclusion that the main texts
selecting criteria are:
- simplicity (simplicity of teaching materials according to the students’
language skills;
- correspondence to psychological
and age peculiarities and interests of students;
- information value;
- presence of the problem (it
enables the students to express their own point of view on the suggested
problem); texts for additional reading should have either the same problem as
the basic text or a very close one, but it would be better if they were
authentic ones ;
- social-cultural saturation;
- communicative orientation;
- linguistic potential: the
availability of language material, which must be learnt in the text;
- the opportunity to use the texts
to develop other kinds of speech activities
(writing, speaking);
- professional orientation and correspondence to the students’ speciality;
- cognitive potential: the ability to promote further cognitive
development of students.
We should also
mention such criteria as content completeness and composition constituent of
the text body. The important component is the presence of a reflective block in
the text body, which will display different attitudes to the problem, described
and will give an opportunity to the reader either to form his own opinion
concerning the problem described, or to agree with the facts described.
The urgency of
the information is also very important while selecting the materials for
teaching professionally oriented reading to future specialists. Preference
should be given to the texts, reflecting the current state of the problem aside
from those that need a retrospective analysis of the problem. The students are
given an opportunity to compare the state of the problem in the native and
foreign culture, to understand and to enrich their own pattern of the world. It
leads to cognitive activity increase including independent search for the
foreign literature and promotes mastering professional communication in a
foreign language to show own knowledge and exchange views with other
specialists. So, in order to get full-fledged knowledge, necessary for the
future professional activity and to systematize the acquired professional
knowledge while reading foreign professionally oriented texts, such texts
characteristics as information saturation and urgency are essential. These text
categories must be quality performance while texts selecting.
We should also
take into account an optimal size of the texts blocks. Optimal text blocks
which are the basis of the students’ of non-linguistic specialities reading for
getting the necessary information, have 18 – 21.5 thousand printed characters [2].
Functional approach to the text material
selection enables to distinguish conditionally its three kinds:
- academic or basic texts (a base for making own monologues on the topic
which is studied);
- texts, on the basis of which reading skills are improved, using
different reading strategies (scanning, skimming, reading for details etc.)
- texts, the content of which gives an opportunity to arrange the work,
directed to the development of the students’ communicative skills (speaking on
the basis of the information acquired from the texts).
The urgent
problem in teaching foreign languages is the lack of learning aids and
text-books, completely meeting all the requirements having been mentioned. It’s
almost impossible to find a text-book comprising teaching materials of the
certain professional orientation, corresponding to the certain students’
speciality at higher educational establishments. Very often foreign learning
aids being colourful, illustrated, full of information, do not take into
account the native mentality. That’s why the teachers have to create the so called
“tailor-made” materials for internal use to meet the needs of a certain group
of students.
Thus, teaching
foreign reading of professionally oriented texts provides not only solving the
problems requiring special educational and substantial context, but also
creates the basis for efficient kinds of speech activity development and
professional communicative competence formation. Careful texts selection
according to numerous mutually complementary criteria is to form an optimal
base for teaching professionally oriented reading to the students of
non-linguistic specialities. Created in such a way texts system, defined as a
macro text, has a great potential while choosing the methods of the students’
training class and out of class activity arrangement.
Литература
1. Барабанова Г. В. Методика навчання професійно-орієнтованого читання у немовному внз:
Навч. посіб. для студ. / Міністерство освіти і науки України. Науково методичний центр. — К. : ІНКОС, 2005. — 315с.
2. Widdowson, H.G. Aspects of Language Teaching. – Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
3.
Шадриков
В. Д. Психология деятельности и способности человека: учебное пособие. М.:
Логос, 1997. 319 с.