Were the pupils speaking?

So we can say that each exercise must be adequate to the speech skills being developed at the lesson. At the same time the exercise must be adequate to the habit - lexical, grammatical, phonetic, spelling etc. Each of them is specific, so the exercises for their development must be also specific. Besides, we must take into account the conditions of teaching. One and the same exercise can have a different effect in different conditions, at different levels, differently organized. Lapidus says the following about the effectiveness of exercises:

‘’Эффективным можно считать такое упражнение, которое позволяет достигнуть поставленной цели и дает большую прочность усвоения за меньшее количество времени, либо при меньшем количестве повторений.’’

Lapidus proposes 5 criteria of the effectiveness of exercises:

1. Pupils’ mental work (while they do the exercise)

2. The exercise should resemble natural communication.

3. The extent of pupils’ independent work.

4. The time each pupil is engaged in doing the exercise (economy of time)

5. How many pupils are engaged in work at a time.

 

Most part of pupils’ activity must be supervised by the teacher to avoid “drilling” their own mistakes. Such exercises are called “controlled” and can be two types:

1. Individual

2. Frontal

A frontal exercise is organized in the following way: stimulus, addressed to the whole group, - pause (when all the pupils do the task) - reproduction by one of the pupils ( the rest correct themselves) – stimulus.

An individual exercise- pupils do the task in turn ( each pupil’s speaking time is limited).

To start considering typology of exercises we must see what the term ‘’foreign language’’ means.

Language is characterized by three aspects:

1. linguistic aspect

2. psychological aspect

3. social aspect

Аll these three aspects make it possible for language to carry out its main function of intercommunication among people. As a school subject a ‘’foreign language’’ is a complex of all the three aspects.

1) By the linguistic aspect we mean:

a). Language material (sounds, lexical units, form words) and speech material (word – combinations, sentences, texts).

The linguistic material can be learned by memorizing. In such way knowledge is acquired:

2). The second aspect – psychological – is processional. Due to this aspect language is viewed as activity and language teaching is considered to be speech development. Thus, the objects of teaching and learning are speech habits and skills.

3). By the third aspect we mean the communicative function of language. In this case language acts as a means of intercommunication. This activity includes speech, habits and skills adequate to natural communication.

 

What happens in reality? There can be a great difference in pupil’s knowledge of the psychological and social aspects of language.

A pupil may with confidence make up sentences, retell texts, answer questions, but at the same time is at a loss in some unexpected situation, when it’s necessary to speak.

 

We can represent all the three aspects in the following way:

 

Linguistic material

 

Habits and skills Communication

All three aspects are closely connected: you can’t learn to speak, if you don’t know linguistic material; you will not be able to communicate without habits and skills of speaking. At the same time you may have some knowledge of the linguistic material, but lack habits and skills, and so on.

You may have speech habits and skills and be unable to communicate.

This close connection of the three aspects makes it possible to suppose: can we combine them? Can we teach all the three aspects simultaneously? There are three approaches to foreign language teaching:

1) linguistic approach (language)

2) psychological approach

3) communicative approach.