A.K.KASYMBEKOVA, G.A.SATYLKHANOVA
Kh.À.Yassawi IKTU, Turkistan
city, Master of Philology, Senior Teachers
THE IMPROVEMENTS OF
COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES OF MEDICAL STUDENTS
At present, speaking as a foreign language represents one of the essential
requirements of today´s society. Besides other skills and knowledge, it
is considered as one of the most influencing factors while applying for a job
or sustaining in a particular work position under the condition of advancing
the language level. Based on our work experience, we can confirm that knowing a
foreign language is a necessity for everyone in general, mainly for our
students – medical students. These people are required to reach a sufficient
level in a foreign language in order to accomplish medicine assignments in
missions abroad. Teaching foreign languages, mainly English, for the many
fields of medicine purposes is provided by our Philology faculty, Foreign Languages
Department at university named after Kh.A.Yassawi, where we have been working
as an English teacher for almost nineteen years. As a teacher it is our duty to
fulfil the students’ desire come true. Our principal goal is to provide the
medical students with as efficient English lessons as possible because it will
be they who will have to deal with international relationships and take
measures for solving various situations with patients of foreign
countries.
The main reason for choosing this topic for our work was to understand how important speaking is in
every day situations. No matter where we are, either in the Republic of
Kazakhstan or in a foreign country, English conversation plays a crucial role
in understanding each other and dealing with different kinds of uncovered
problems. It means that not only medical students that we teach, need English
for communication abroad but also Kazakh teachers need English to communicate
with their colleagues – native speakers. To do this, we must be able to have
our own skills regularly. At our work we have an opportunity to encounter with
people from various parts of the world and we are very interested in the way
they use English as their mother tongue. These co-workers have a greater
supporting role in our teaching process and it is always valuable to have a
chat with them and ask questions to make sure our judgement was right. Even if
they come from America, England, Australia or Turkey and their accents differ, it is just a question of time for
teachers and also students to adjust to their speech and distinguish
differences in pronunciation.
Being able to keep a fluent conversation with a native speaker is viewed
as the main goal of our students, which underlines the importance of speaking
skills in a student´s point of view. Therefore, in our work we decided to
concentrate on communicative activities which might be helpful for English
teachers and expand their students´ communicative skills.
In our work we deal with the difference between speaking and
conversation, and explain its practical use in every day life. We also aim to
highlight the importance of motivation in teaching practice and the techniques
and approaches used to enhance students´ desire to speak a foreign
language. While dealing with communicative activities, we focused on
distinguishing them either as accuracy or fluency activities and provided
definitions of these terms. The role of a teacher is also discussed suggesting
useful ideas to make the speaking lesson as effective as possible. The
practical part consists of a set of pre-taught communicative activities
described minutely and their evaluation for other teachers who would like to
apply them in their speaking lessons.
Every speaking lesson should be based on communicative activities which
fulfill two important language learning needs. They encourage the learners to
acquire language knowledge and prepare them for real-life language use.
Achieving the outcome requires the participants to interact, which means not
only speak with a person but also listen to what he or she is saying and react
to it.
Communicative activities are dealt with in a large number of methodology
books and their classification is distinguished according to each
author´s point of view. However, all of them mention the same or similar
communicative tasks but in different extent. Supported by a sufficient amount
of literature, we created the following categorization of prevailing
communicative activities:
Information gap
activities
Information gap activities are described by Thornbury [1.80-84.] who
claims that in these kinds of tasks there is a knowledge gap among learners and
it can be bridged by using the language. So, in order to obtain the
information, the interactants have to communicate. Littlewood [2.22-26.] labels
these activities as functional communication activities. He emphasizes sharing
the information among learners and its processing.
The most common information gap activity is spotting the differences in
the pictures, exchanging personal information, guessing games and also creating
the story based on flashcards shown to the students in random order, for a few
seconds and one flashcard per group only. This makes the students cooperate and
communicate with each other to find the lacking information.
Discussions
Discussions are a commonly used activity in a speaking lesson. A topic
is introduced to the students via a reading or a listening passage and then
they are asked to discuss a related topic in order to come up with a solution or
a response. Celce-Murcia [3.106.] mentions that students need to be reminded
that each person within a group should have a specific responsibility in the
discussion – either keeping time, taking notes or reporting the results made by
the group members.
Role plays
A widely spread and one of the best communicative activities is a role
play which trains the students in the classroom to deal with unpredictable
real-life conversation in an English speaking environment. Ladousse [4. 6.]
points out the special reasons for using the role play in the lessons. It puts
students in situations in which they are required to use and develop language
necessary in social relationships and helps them to build up their social
skills. Using role play is useful especially while teaching shy students who
have difficulty participating in conversation about themselves. Through this
activity they are put into various roles and no longer feel that their own
personality is implicated. Role play is an essential communicative technique
which develops fluency, promotes interaction in the classroom and increases
motivation.
Simulations
Simulation is a kind of role play but the emphasis is put on creating
the atmosphere of a real world. Students pretend they are a part of a simulated
environment and take part either as themselves or are given a role and pretend
being someone else. To achieve a suitable simulated environment, the classroom
is usually rearranged and, where possible, converted in a required place
according to the situation.
Guessing games
Guessing games can be used as free activities for revision of vocabulary
or as an interesting way to give quite controlled practice. Although they are
called “games”, they provide intensive language practice, especially in asking
questions, so they should not be regarded as an extra activity. Students are
fond of these guessing tasks mainly because they enjoy themselves without
realizing they also practise and improve their speaking skills.
Pair work and group work present ways of organizing the class while
teaching speaking. The teacher´s responsibility is to choose a suitable
communicative activity depending on what is going to be practised – either
fluency or accuracy – and organize the students into pairs or groups. In some
activities such as role plays and guessing games, pair work is essential. On
the other hand, discussions and debates require group work and enable the
students to express their opinions on a given topic within the group. After
that, the spokesman of each group notifies the rest of the class about the
conclusion they have reached. This may lead to a following discussion among
groups and if the topic is amusing, the speaking lesson seems to be enjoyable
for both students and the teacher, too.
Advantages of pair and
group work
There are many reasons for pair and group work to be used in the
lessons. First of all, they provide the students with a lot more practice than
working as a whole class. Students also feel more comfortable to speak to one
or two people rather than the whole class and the teacher. Moreover, speaking
to just a few people is closer to real-life situations.
Pair and group work allows each student to work at the pace of his or
her small group or pair. The teacher is no more considered the only source of
information but the students learn from each other. This creates opportunities
for learners´ knowledge to be shared. In order to be successful, learners
need to become accustomed to using English without the teacher´s
permanent support. Therefore, working in pairs or groups helps them to build up
their independence and confidence for further conversations.
The advantages of pair and group work can be noticeable not only from
the learner´s but also the teacher’s point of view. It provides the
teacher with more time to work with weaker students and encourage them, by
participating in a role play or discussion, to communicate. Teachers can also
benefit from a great availableness of different communicative activities being
offered in bookshops and on the internet nowadays. The variety of materials for
pair or group work speaking practice is praised by most of them and their use
has proved to be very efficient for speaking skill improvement.
Some disadvantages of
pair and group work
However efficient and useful pair and group work is, it may sometimes
cause little problems while practising speaking. According to Doff [5.141.] the
noise belongs to these obstacles the teachers have to overcome during lessons.
Usually the students themselves are not disturbed by the noise; it is more
noticeable to the teacher observing pairs or groups. However, the noise created
by pair and group work demonstrates learners´ engagement in a speaking
task and gives the teacher visual evidence of students´ involvement.
Considering this, the success in working in pairs or groups depends mainly on
the students´ and the teacher’s approach.
Another fact Doff [5.141.] mentions is the difficulty to control the
whole class during a communicative activity. To stop activity getting out of
control, it is important to give the students clear instructions, define the
speaking task clearly and set up a routine, so that students accept the idea of
working in pairs or groups and know exactly what to do.
The teacher is a facilitator of students´ learning and as such he
has many roles to fulfill. Freeman [6.131.] describes him as a manager of classroom activities. In
this role, one of his major responsibilities is to set up activities that
promote communication. During the communicative activities he acts as a consultant answering students´
questions, offers advice and provides necessary language items. One of the most
important roles is to make sure that students know what they are supposed to
practise and check if they do it effectively. These roles are called a conductor and a monitor. Although there is a great number of various activities
which may be used in speaking lessons, their use would be confusing and
pointless if they would not be logically organized. Being a good organiser should be an ability possessed
by every skillful teacher.
Considering the facts mentioned above we can conclude that the
teacher´s personality in a learning process is very important not only
while participating in the activity but also while monitoring the students. The
teacher´s less dominant role in communicative activities offers the
students the opportunity to be involved in conversation and improve their speaking
skills to be able to manage with the real-life situations.
Summing up
In our article, we focused on, were communicative activities and their
categorization: information gap activities, discussions, role plays, simulations
and guessing games. We characterized them and evaluated the interaction they
offer to prepare students for real-life language use. In connection with them,
we dealt with terms accuracy and fluency and explained the importance of
distinguishing them due to teacher´s objective within the lesson. We introduced
different techniques for correcting mistakes in either accuracy or fluency
communicative activities and also described the roles of a teacher and
requirements which he or she has to carry out to manage the roles successfully.
Used literatures:
1. THORNBURY, Scott. How to Teach Speaking. Essex:Pearson Education Limited
2005, 156p.
2. LITTLEWOOD, William. Communicative Language Teaching.Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press 1994, 108p.
3. CELCE-MURCIA, Marianne. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Boston:Heinle&Heinle 2001, 584p.
4. LADOUSSE, Gillian Porter, Role Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press
1987, 182p.
5. DOFF, Adrian. Teaching English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1989, 286p.
6. FREEMAN, Diane Larsen. Techniques and Principles In Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1986, 142p.
7. Milrud Z.G.Organization of role play at the lesson.-Foreign languages at a lesson.-1987.¹1.