Øï³ðêî Ï.Ô., ̳õíåíêî Ã.Å.

Íàö³îíàëüíèé òåõí³÷íèé óí³âåðñèòåò Óêðà¿íè

„Êè¿âñüêèé ïîë³òåõí³÷íèé ³íñòèòóò”

            TEACHING INTENSIVE READING IN POLYTECHNICS

          With the development of science and technology language teaching is facing great opportunities and challenges. Intensive reading, as a crucial part of learning and teaching, is also facing inevitable changes. Students of Polytechnics mainly deal with intensive type of reading. They usually have to read a page of the text to explore the meaning of the text and then to transform it into oral presentation. In this type of reading they are usually exposed to relatively short texts closely connected with their future field of activity. The importance of reading professionally oriented texts for this category of readers is out of question. It is obvious that reading component of an English language course has to include a set of learning goals for the ability to read different texts in English, for building knowledge of language which will facilitate reading ability, for building schematic knowledge, for the ability to adapt the reading style according to reading purpose (skimming, scanning or careful reading).

          Experienced teachers of English as a second language perfectly well know how important it is to make your lessons interesting and stimulating. So, we have to take into consideration the importance of motivation and its role in the educational process. Psychologists say that students’ ability to learn can be increased or decreased by 25% or more , depending on whether he or she is taught in a stimulating environment or not.

          The process of learning is directly connected with the cognitive capabilities of our brain. What relation does it have to the problem of intensive reading?        

Everybody knows that our brain consists of two sides that the left hemisphere is the language side of the brain and the right hemisphere is the intuitive or non-verbal. But does it mean, that left hemisphere stores the speech sounds or words, or sentences we use? What about reading or writing, sign language of the deaf? Humans are the only creatures that play cards or chess. Does it mean that we have special part in our brain that is responsible for this type of thinking activity? In cards or chess we have to plan our actions ahead and the level of planning required is matched to our brain capacity so that we can not see so far ahead that we know the final outcome, but we can see far enough ahead that we can influence the outcome and do not feel like all is left to chance.                                                              

          As with any activity that envisages planning ahead, our ancestors may have invented a means of communication that matched the cognitive capabilities of their brain. Some scientists consider that people of the world have so called universal language in the form of capabilities. These capabilities culturally evolved into language. Our desire to communicate with each other is hardwired into our brain. In the absence of an existing language this overpowering desire forces us to create a new language. However, because this new language is built upon the same cognitive structures as an existing language would have been, the new language shares common structural themes with existing language.

          Neurologists have studied brain and language relationships. They made maps of the left hemisphere that illustrates how language is represented in the left hemisphere. In their maps a large region of the central portion of the left hemisphere is devoted to representation of speech sounds (phonemes), the combination of those phonemes into meaningful units like word-endings and words (morphemes), and grammatical rules (syntax) for combining these words into meaningful sentences.  

A larger area that surrounds this language core in the left hemisphere contains regions that allow us to translate our non-verbal concepts, ideas, and images into nouns and verbs. There is evidence that the ability to think of verbs involves structures in the frontal regions of the left hemisphere while nouns are more widely dispersed below and behind the central language core. Recent studies have shown that users of sign language employ roughly the same brain areas. In sign language, the equivalent of a morpheme is a visual-motor sign. Studies of the areas of the brain used for reading have generally shown that the same areas involved in oral language usage and comprehension, are involved in reading.

          So language can be defined as a translation of entities, events, relationships and inferences into auditory symbols. Reading may be thought of as a second translation of written symbols to the auditory ones. As far as language is concerned, reading is language.

          If cognitive capabilities of our brain are the same and they create so called universal language in the form of capabilities that inevitably evolve into common for us all universal language this abstract language has also to be approximately the same for all human creatures. The idea is not new and it was stated in the Bible in the talk of the Babylon tower builders who spoke the same language.

Every time human beings learn something, they have to go through the some steps: unconscious competence (before trying to learn something you do not even know it exists), conscious incompetence (when you begin to learn you realize that you do not know it), conscious competence (you learn the skill but you have to think about what you are doing) and unconscious competence (if you have learned a skill very well, it reaches a point where it becomes automatic).

Translation is not only a conscious activity but in low foreign language levels it is also an (un)conscious mean of learning, as learners associate the new words to their world knowledge or native language. Through these associations they explore true and false cognates which, in both cases, help to develop their foreign language. So taking control over these (un)conscious translations is another mean of improving foreign language learning. A holistic approach to learning not only considers what is taught, but also how and why. The more involved the whole person is, the higher the motivation will be and, consequently, the assimilation (acquisition) of the subject.

          So, working out the strategy in teaching of intensive reading, we have to select appropriate materials that have to have both common part (approximately 1500-2000 most commonly used words) and specific part (words that are characteristic to this or that specific field of activity). Teachers have to develop in their students’ proper word recognition and comprehension abilities, based on appropriate lesson planning and creativity of teaching staff.