How to make the learning more effective

Teaching English at school is closely connected with the problem of personal intercommunication. English teachers often encounter the fact of students losing the interest towards English as school subject. Unfortunately our students view school lessons of foreign language as a set of grammar rules and a number of words which are difficult to use in everyday situations. In order to develop students’ functional literacy through studying foreign languages we teachers should be responsible for the learning process. The role of a teacher today is more than just planning and executing lesson plans it’s also becoming the students’ third parent, becoming their role model and their 24/7 support system.

Meanwhile English at school should have the main purpose that is to teach students communication. Nowadays English teachers of our school have a good opportunity to use the language material given in textbooks Messages, English in mind worked out by Diana Goodey and Herbert and Jeff Stranks. The texts for reading and listening range widely. The students are offered the material about inventions, about the importance of dreams, bicycle revolution in Europe and so on. There are a lot of information for extra reading about our country, some advice on organizing vocabulary learning and up-today information about a visit to the doctor’s. Our students get to know the terms, which seems strange before. So listening to the text “Music that changes lives” they understand how great musicians help the poor kids to realize their dreams. Naturally it has become evident that if we want to teach our students fluent and exact English we should provide them with interesting and modern texts for reading and discussion. It is difficult to make students talk about the problems of American unemployed people and how they try to get them over because our students have other problems and they would gladly speak about them. We think that if the English teacher doesn’t have modern textbooks he may create interesting situations in class by reading unknown texts or listening to specially arranged language material. So the first thing we want to speak about in the process of effective English teaching is the fact of having enough language additional material. Secondly, it is clear that we cannot teach communication without groups of students making atmosphere fun and comfortable. Suppose we have twenty or twenty-five students in class and one problem to discuss. Then it will be more effective to divide the students into four or five groups and suggest them to discuss it at first within the group. Then each group chooses a representative who will speak on behalf of the whole group. In such case all the students of the group will feel their participation in general discussion. Next time they will probably volunteer to speak themselves.

Sometimes the groups are given different tasks and while discussion students should come to some generalization. For example studying vocabulary of Unit 8“Ways of living” English in Mind 2 students are divided into three groups. The first one should find in the given list of words only those which can be used by males, the second group is responsible for words used by females only and the third group would choose the words which can be used both by males and females. Then the groups start reading their lists and in case they have referred one word to two different lists they discuss it and try to come to an understanding. The teacher’s role here is to tell students the meaning of all the words mentioned or to provide the groups with a dictionary which is of course less interesting because then the students will make fewer mistakes but won’t remember the words as well as in case they mistook it for another one and were corrected.

Another example of group division can be found while working with Unit 3. The groups are given the task to listen to one of Joni Mitchell’s songs; it is called “Big yellow taxi”, and try to write down the missing words of the song. Usually listening needs to be done more than twice and only then the groups start to compare their versions and come to an understanding. The following level suggests giving the students rhymes and asking them to make a poem of their own. When the group is working together some of them give the ideas and some keep silence so their poem is the result of collaborated work and the teacher should give marks which are a little big higher than usually. English in Mind also provides useful and interesting situations at the lessons. There are a lot of exercises on spoken and idiomatic English. Most of them are supported by typescripts. Students try to match parts of the expressions first of all orally, then they compare their ideas with the  CD tape scripts. Finally they are offered to try to reproduce the dialogues and come back to these expressions nearly every lesson. So there are some the following idiomatic expressions:

Sorry, I am late. I got held up in the traffic.

Never mind. You are here now. Come and sit down.

Hurry up. We are late.

Hand on a sec. I’m just going to the loo. and etc.

Texts for listening and reading cover all possible spheres of life. Among them are the questions of wonders of the modern world and some information about where boys become crocodile men, about a flying disaster, medicine in the past, when people knew very little about medicine. TV star who lead a double life and believes that God had chosen her to do it that is to tell simple people about art in simple words. Some listening exercises are arranged in such a way that demands class division into groups.

We try to supply our students with the ability to speak not only fluently but accurate so teaching grammar is considered to be as important as teaching reading, listening and pronunciation. There’s a certain point of view that grammar at school is an exclusively sentence-level phenomenon. But this perspective is outmoded and has had negative consequences for the way in which grammar is described and taught. A sentence-level view of grammar is also inconsistent with the notion of communicative competence which includes at least four interacting competencies: linguistic competence, socio-linguistic competence, discourse and strategic competence. Since communicative competence is the foundation of communicative language teaching, it is clearly important that we move beyond the sentence level in the conceptions of grammar exercises are given in English in Mind or Messages Workbooks, so they cover all the grammar items and contribute much into fluent and accurate speech. In Unit 2 grammar theme under revision is Present time and the first task is to read the profiles of the different people which are jumbled and define which paragraph goes with which picture. Having read and discussed the texts the students turn to a new page and try to do the sentence completion without looking at the texts.

So we want to underline once more that successful English studying depends on several factors among them”

• Good textbooks and visual aids
• The harmony in the development of reading, writing, listening and speaking
• Teaching good pronunciation
• The students’ ability to work in groups
• We should keep in memory that English at school serves for communication but grammar is very important as well. English teacher should know the subject perfectly and try to create at the lesson an atmosphere of good relationship and mutual help and understanding. In order to learn the language one should love it and fulfill all the tasks with pleasure.

Дощанова Алия Казиевна,
Учитель английского языка,
КГУ СОШ №29, ВКО г. Семей