Development of writing skills in foreign language lessons

According to the Educational Standard, the specificity of practical mastery of a foreign language in secondary school is determined by the general status of a foreign language as a general education subject. The main goal of the subject "Foreign language" is the formation of foreign language communicative competence, that is, the ability and readiness of students for foreign language interpersonal and intercultural communication with native speakers. In this regard, the main task of the school in the field of this academic subject is to achieve a certain level of communicative competence by students, both in oral and written communication. I.N. Zhinkin believes that among all the main types of foreign language speech activities that provide general language training of a student and the formation of a student's linguistic personality, writing is the least studied theoretically and insufficiently developed in the methodological aspect.

The goal of teaching writing is to develop the ability to express thoughts in writing, that is, students must learn to compose the same texts in a foreign language as they can do it in their native language, i.e. composing any text, they express their thoughts in graphic form.

In the modern methodology of teaching a foreign language at all stages, special attention is paid to the development of writing skills as a learning goal, which is due to the development of scientific and technological progress, the widespread use of modern information technologies, electronic messages and

Internet resources, as well as the need to improve the quality of training students in a foreign language to pass the unified state exam.

In the conditions of a modern school, the teacher is given the right to independently choose the appropriate and more effective teaching methods, and therefore, a lot of research is being carried out in this area.

According to Jeff Petty, in order to make the right choice of a teaching method, a teacher must know what methods exist, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each teaching method, what tasks each of them can solve and how to use them in practice.

According to A.V. Konisheva, recently, at all levels of education, when organizing the educational process, interest in independent work has noticeably grown. In this case, the most important thing is that the educational institution would provide not only a certain amount of knowledge, but would also teach students to draw independent conclusions based on the knowledge gained, developing their creative thinking. This is precisely the main goal of education, in contrast to the traditional methodology, where there is a formalized transfer of knowledge and social norms to the student. L.A. Ryabkova believes that one of the methods for the implementation of student-centered learning is the Daltonplan method.

Helen Parkhurst, an American educator, conducted experimental teaching in a regular school in the small town of Dalton, Massachusetts in 1920, and then for several years she experimented in her own school, consisting of only one classroom. She tried to find favorable approaches to organizing the activities of children in the educational process and developed her "Laboratory Plan", the purpose of which was to teach children to live in society, to develop their mind, body and spirit. The name of the school became Dalton - after the name of the city where the plan was first tested. According to Piet Plog, with the exception of John Dewey, no American educational reformer enjoys the greatest international success and influence as Helen Parkhurst, the founder of Dalton education.

Methodologists also paid attention to the Dalton plan method. T.I. Shamova and T.M. Davidenko formulated the main tasks of the Dalton-plan method:

• •    first, the implementation of the individualized development of each student;

• •    secondly, ensuring the development of the student's social experience by mastering such skills as cooperation, responsibility and independence in educational and cognitive activities.

The main idea of the Dalton plan method is that the student performs work with whoever he wants, asks for help from whoever he wants, but he is responsible for the task.

The Dalton Plan is a combination of lessons that are taught in classrooms and self-directed assignments that are completed by students in subject laboratories. The teacher develops assignments - the so-called "contracts" between teacher and student. Assignments can be designed individually for each student, or can be shared across the class. The teacher's task is to study the typical needs of social life, and the actual character of the individual, i.e. his specific needs and capabilities.

After analyzing the experience of teachers of foreign languages, we found that in their lessons they use different teaching methods, including the Dalton plan method. The opinions of all teachers agree that this method is used very rarely, since the compilation of Dalton assignments is a very time-consuming job, which involves a lot of preparatory work, compiling assignments separately for each student, and creating appropriate conditions for their implementation.

In accordance with the theme and purpose of our research, we developed an adapted version of the Dalton-plan method in the conditions of a modern school - Dalton-hour in English lessons and conducted a trial teaching, during which the tasks developed by us were used in English lessons based on the Dalton plan method. We have developed 3 tasks on the following topics: "Countries and nationalities",Languages, Everyday work. Each of the tasks was completed within a week. For each Dalton assignment, criteria were developed based on the control and measurement materials of the final exam of the basic school. The tasks were compiled taking into account the curriculum and the age characteristics of the students. Students took part in the trial training. The training was carried out in two groups: in the control group, where training was carried out according to the traditional program, and in the trial training group, where the tasks developed by us on the basis of the Dalton plan method were used in English lessons.

After the trial training, we compared the initial and final indicators of the development of writing skills of the students in the control group and the group of the trial training.

In this regard, it can be concluded that using the Dalton Plan method to develop writing skills in English lessons can be effective. In this case, the prerequisites are: taking into account the theoretical foundations of the development of writing skills and the Dalton plan method; taking into account the experience of foreign language teachers; taking into account the psychological and age-related characteristics of students. It is obvious that the Dalton plan is worthy of special attention.