Actual problems of modern teaching foreign languages

Автор: Azimbayeva R., Ivliyeva G.

Журнал: Форум молодых ученых @forum-nauka

Статья в выпуске: 5-1 (21), 2018 года.

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The article is considered the main methods of teaching students to read professionally oriented foreign.

Methods of teaching, skimming reading, introductory reading, searching reading, language material, text''s content, skills and abilities

Короткий адрес: https://sciup.org/140282374

IDR: 140282374

Текст научной статьи Actual problems of modern teaching foreign languages

Now, as never before, there are all the conditions for studying a foreign language: it is the opportunity to travel abroad, and communicate with native speakers via the Internet, and the opportunity to invite foreign specialists. The significant expansion of international contacts in various spheres of human activity significantly influenced the changing needs and goals of mastering the language of international communication. Today, we have gained more freedom in establishing direct international contacts. Due to this, it became possible to have a variety of authentic materials, on the basis of which training is provided. These are textbooks published in the countries of the studied language, periodical literature, video films, phonetic materials, read by native speakers, etc.

As a result, the formation of foreign competence became one of the main objectives of teaching foreign languages. Integration of Russia into a single European general education space, improvement and reform of language education led to a new understanding of the goals, objectives and content of teaching foreign languages.

A positive factor in the course of reforming language education is the possibility of international cooperation. Many educational institutions participate in international projects, joint training materials, Internet programs are being developed, interuniversity conferences, symposia on sharing experiences, etc. are being held. A large reserve for increasing the motivation for teaching and improving foreign languages is in the possibility of using mass media: news programs, feature films, musical programs, youth programs.

In this article we are talking about ways to learn a foreign language in a non-linguistic university by developing the skills of reading foreign language text, taking into account the basic knowledge of trainees, the features of the interpretation of a foreign language text in Russian, and background knowledge in a particular field.

The problem of increasing the effectiveness of teaching foreign languages in non-linguistic universities remains relevant until today. It's no secret that after graduating from high school, a large percentage of graduates go to various courses "to finish their studies" or to learn a new language again. When studying at a university in conditions of a shortage of academic hours, there are objective difficulties in developing key skills for reading non-linguistic high schools in professional literature in a foreign language.

To ensure that the reading course at a university meets the professional needs of a specialist, the following classification of reading skills is suggested:

  • 1)    skills associated with understanding the language material, ensure the accuracy of understanding the read;

  • 2)    skills associated with understanding the content of the text, provide a comprehensive understanding and include also the ability to highlight in the text of certain meaningful elements, to generalize the content of the text, to relate its individual parts to each other;

  • 3)    the skills associated with understanding the content of the text provide a depth of understanding and include the ability to draw conclusions based on the facts of the text, evaluate the content as a whole, interpret the text.

The effective development of these skills makes it possible, in reading, to concentrate mainly on the semantic perception of the text.

J.A.Suvorov and R.P. Millrud conducted a serious analysis of the problems of studying a foreign language and prepared the "Program of General Education

Institutions for the Study of Foreign Languages in Modern Conditions" [1, p. 29,

  • 41] . They argue that the root of all the shortcomings in the study of a foreign language is laid back in school, so those who come to the university from ordinary secondary school applicants often do not possess the above skills or speak, but at a level insufficient for full-fledged, mature reading of foreign literature. Graduates of schools specializing in in-depth study of a foreign language, as a rule, speaking skills are much more developed than reading skills. We completely agree with these remarks, because in our everyday work we are faced with the inability of students to properly work with foreign language text.

At the same time, it is precisely in the conditions of school education that the mechanisms of "proper" reading should be formed in the process of working on so-called "educational" reading.

Based on the final level of requirements for reading skills, a high school graduate should be able to read about simple texts from public, political, popular science, and adapted texts from fiction, containing up to 9% of unfamiliar vocabulary, realizing the following skills in the reading process:

all kinds of conjectures;

semantic synthesis;

semantic processing.

If the graduate of the school had the skills of the above three groups, he would have an excellent basis for developing skills in professional reading. But, unfortunately, this is not always the case, and the teachers of the university have the task to develop or adjust these skills in relation to reading professional literature.

To do this, we must imagine for what purpose, as a rule, the future specialist reads professional literature. The use of sources in a foreign language most often pursues the following objectives:

  • 1)    familiarity with publications on a specific issue;

  • 2)    elucidation of the main trends or directions of foreign research in this or that area;

  • 3)    selection of material for scientific work;

  • 4)    compiling a bibliography on a specific issue.

Thus, reading in professional work serves not so much communicative as cognitive needs, and the student must resort to all kinds of reading: to the student, to the fact-finding, and to the viewing, and to the search [2, p. 553].

One of the most important skills necessary for this kind of reading is the ability of various kinds of guesses: in order to save time and improve the efficiency of reading, the graduate must be able to guess the meaning of most of the unfamiliar words.

The guess, depending on the leading supports, is divided into the following types, which make up the general skill: 1) intra-verbal, 2) contextual, 3) intraword-contextual.

Intrasyllabic conjecture involves the disclosure of the meaning of a word on the basis of an analysis of its derivational elements.

Contextual guesses can be used when the context with its thematic, semantic and structural links actualises the categorical meaning of the word, which narrows to a concrete one. Its mechanism is complex, it is based on individual associative links, but it is possible to teach it, because students can establish conceptual associations, relate language units to the necessary grammatical categories, and language material - to lexical categories. In addition, students in their level of development have a high ability to study the nature of mental operations, i.e. heuristic [3, p. 491], and can seek more rational solutions depending on their personal experience.

Intrasyllabic contextual guessing is the simplest kind of conjecture, which is supported by etymology and context.

The above guesses are aimed at determining the exact meaning of an unfamiliar word.

To effectively teach these skills in a university, the optimal conditions for their development should be considered [4, p. 12]. Obviously, it makes no sense to teach either the skills of conjecture, the skills described below, or speech skills in general, if the student does not have a certain stock of language knowledge and does not know the language skills that ensure the processing of information at the language level and understanding the content of texts at the level values.

The language skills include: the ability to correlate the meaning of the word with the context of the sentence;

the ability to establish the semantic links between words, sentences, paragraphs and combine them into syntagmas, paragraphs, and semantic parts, respectively;

the ability to perceive a sentence or paragraph as a semantic whole;

ability to determine the main and secondary in the sentence, paragraph;

ability to predict at the language level. With these skills, the former student comes to the university, and they are usually adjusted during the first semester. When the language base is already prepared, it is possible to start developing speech skills on the basis of texts of a professional orientation.

Speech skills include the skills of semantic synthesis and semantic processing. Students have a high ability to retrospectively synthesize, which is carried out by means of the mechanism of reciprocation, that is, a periodic return to individual fragments of the text or to what has been read as a whole under the influence of new data, thoughts, associations. This technique is characteristic for understanding complex texts, when the processes of comprehension and perception of the read do not merge together. This mechanism includes the following operations: retention in the reader's memory of understandable meanings; return to the previously understood; a combination of understandable meanings for understanding the directly perceived.

The mechanism of recycling acts together with the mechanism of antipathy, i.e. anticipating the further development of the main idea of the text on several key phrases, which involves anticipating what has not yet been perceived, and is realized in the semantic hypotheses. Recipitation has a priority role in the reading process, because Without comparing the newly extracted information with the previously understandable it is impossible to construct anticipating semantic hypotheses.

The ability of students to engage in intensive analitico-synthetic activities, the high degree of development of their intellectual skills and logical thinking skills, facilitating the rapid search and establishment of cause-effect relationships, make it possible to teach the skills of the semantic synthesis to private skills. These private skills are as follows:

the ability to identify in the text certain elements (semantic milestones, key words, supporting facts) and, basing on them, to extract from the flow of speech an essential thought or meaning;

the ability to generalize certain facts in their logical sequence;

the ability to relate individual parts, to define a logical connection between them.

The criteria for the formation of the skills of the semantic synthesis are the correctness of understanding the content of the reading and the completeness of the understanding that characterizes the formation of the above-mentioned skills and is determined by the level of combination of understood meanings (the allowed level should not be less than 75% of the ideal (100%)).

The experience accumulated by students and received by them in the process of studying at the university gives them the opportunity to work on the development of private skills of the group of skills of semantic processing, such as: the ability to make a conclusion; identify the idea of a text that is not expressed verbally in it; suppose the possible development of the above;

the ability to assess the facts and content of the text as a whole, the nature of the implementation of the author's intention;

the ability to interpret - to understand the subtext.

So, what are the reading skills in general a student should have by the time the university course of foreign language education is over?

The ability to quickly learn the familiar language material when reading.

The ability to use props in the text to understand an unfamiliar word or the contextual meaning of a known word.

Ability to use the dictionary effectively, which includes the following skills:

  • a)    receptive verbal lexical skill - to correctly recognize and understand the lexical unit in the context;

  • b)    receptive language lexical skill - set the value of the lexical unit when referring to the dictionary;

  • c)    the skill of using the dictionary - quickly and accurately find the word in a bilingual dictionary;

  • d)    language grammatical skill - to determine by formal attributes the belonging of a lexical unit to a certain part of speech;

  • e)    grammatical language retransformational skill - to transform the grammatical form of the word into the original dictionary form;

  • e)    ability to choose the meaning of the desired word-find a value that is appropriate in the context;

  • g)    the ability to use the dictionary rationally - if you understand the general content of the text, you should refer to the dictionary only if it is violated;

  • h)    the ability to guess the meaning of certain words, which reduces the number of word searches;

  • i)    the ability to compress text - to neglect details that do not carry basic information;

  • k)    a receptive grammatical skill - to learn the syntactic structure of a sentence, to determine its main terms.

A detailed enumeration of the skills that make up the use of the dictionary is given here because the vocabulary often does not contribute to effective reading instruction and is misused in class, so these skills need to be developed. We continue to determine the final skills: the ability to understand the structure of the text; the ability to understand individual facts of the text; the ability to evaluate the read text. Work on the development of reading skills is very time-consuming, requires considerable time and effort. Important is the material, with the use of which is training. Involving in the process of teaching the reading of professionally significant, interesting texts that imply their further use as additional material on special subjects, can contribute to increasing students' motivation and increasing interest in obtaining information from foreign sources.

Список литературы Actual problems of modern teaching foreign languages

  • Suvorova Zh.A., Milrud R.P. English language. Programs for educational establishments. Subjectical line of texts books «Star English». M., 2011.
  • Solovey S.S. English course for law enforcement colleges of the Interior of the Russian Federation. Omsk, 2001.
  • Socoilogical encyclopedic Russian-English dictionary / S.A. Kravchenko. M., 2004.
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