The development of English speaking skills of students

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Kharkiv Institute of Trade and Economics of Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS OF STUDENTS

Kitchenko A.S., Untila M.P.

ANNOTATION

communication verbal student english

This article is devoted to ability of development of English speaking skills of students. A special section of the work on preparing students for verbal communication is the development of their communicative skills. We considered several groups of communicative skills. We proposed speech situations which help to improve speaking skills. During our research we found out that the main reason for poor speaking skills of students was their reluctance to communicate for many reasons, including psychological discomfort and fear of making mistakes.

Keywords: speaking, communication, skills, English, students, barrier, ability.

АНОТАЦІЯ

Розвиток мовленнєвих навичок в англійській мові у студентів

Китченко А.С., Унтіла М.П., Харківський торговельно-економічний інститут Київського національного торговельно-економічного університету

Дана стаття присвячена здатності розвитку мовленнєвих навичок в англійській мові у студентів. Спеціальним розділом роботи з підготовки студентів до вербальної комунікації є розвиток їх комунікативних навичок. Були розглянуті кілька груп комунікативних навичок. Було запропоновано мовні ситуації, які допомагають поліпшити розмовні навички. В ході дослідження було з'ясовано, що є основною причиною поганих навичок спілкування у студентів.

Ключові слова: говоріння, спілкування, навички, англійська мова, студенти, бар'єр, здатність.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Развитие речевых навыков в английском языке у студентов

Китченко А.С., Унтила М.П., Харьковский торгово-экономический институт Киевского национального торгово-экономического университета

Данная статья посвящена способности развития речевых навыков в английском языке у студентов. Специальным разделом работы по подготовке студентов к вербальной коммуникации является развитие их коммуникативных навыков. Были рассмотрены несколько групп коммуникативных навыков. Были предложены речевые ситуации, которые помогают улучшить разговорные навыки. В ходе исследования было выяснено, что является основной причиной плохих навыков общения у студентов.

Ключевые слова: говорение, общение, навыки, английский язык, студенты, барьер, способность.

Тhe statement of the problem. Due to the almost complete absence of environment for communication, close to the authentic, as well as native speakers, the process of listening English turns out to be very difficult for the students of non-language faculty. As practice shows, while listening there are conditions that prevent fully expressing of personality, reduce activity, prevent its creative self-expression. This all can lead to a general dissatisfaction with the results of education and affect the reduction of effectiveness of the teacher. According to scientists, the main environment for learning a foreign language is the language environment, and everything else is an alternative means, and their purpose is to create a more or less clearly expressed illusion of students' immersion in the natural language environment.

There is an opinion: if in the teaching of oral speech the teacher concentrates all efforts on speaking and will ensure the mastery of this ability, then students will learn to understand the speech spontaneously, without narrowly-function- al instruction. Perception and understanding of the speech is a complex brain activity that requires great intellectual effort from those who perceive foreign speech. Overcoming communication barriers, we learn to understand and respect representatives of another culture. To talk about ways to overcome the language barrier, you need to understand the reasons that cause it: psychological insecurity, negative previous experience of learning English, lack of motivation for the student, lack of practice of communication in English. Speaking about the reasons of the emergence of a language barrier, it should be noted that one of the main reasons is the person's psychological insecurity, fear of making a mistake, a feeling of discomfort when communicate in English.

The purpose of the article. This article is devoted to ability of development of English speaking skills of students. In order to overcome the language barrier that is caused by psychological insecurity, it is necessary to create comfortable conditions in English classes, in which potential abilities of a person would be revealed so that a person could psychologically relax and speak spontaneously on any topic.

If such conditions are followed, part of the problems that cause the language barrier will be removed. Fear of making a mistake, perhaps, is appearing because of incorrect teaching or incorrectly created conditions for teaching English. Very often it is the fault of the teachers with whom the student once studied: perhaps the teachers were constantly corrected the student's mistakes, not giving him the opportunity to express his point of view, which is wrong. Speaking about correcting mistakes and removing fear of mistakes, it is necessary to take into account the psychological characteristics of each student. It must be remembered that some inaccuracies can be corrected during the speech, and some -- only after the person has finished his saying. Also the teacher's task is to conduct a conversation with the student, to make it clear that the communicative method is more effective, to show that any material learned in the lesson can be used immediately, and also show practical applicability in the lesson. Using such techniques psychological difficulties and language barrier can be removed, which are caused by negative experience of learning English.

The statement of the main material. Regarding the practical aspect of communication, it should be noted that the whole process of teaching English should be based on creating communicative situations as close to reality as possible. In this context, it becomes necessary to introduce speech patterns, language skills as close to reality as possible. The student must understand that every word, situation and structure are necessary for him to solve communicative task both in class and in real life. Training the language in situations that is closed to reality, allows a person to transfer all that was passed in the classroom in English, into real life.

Y. Karaulov defines three levels of the language personality model: 1) zero level -- the verbal-semantic level or the inner vocabulary of personality, represented in the language consciousness in the form of microsystems (lexico-semantic groups, grammatical means, word combinations and sentences). This is the level of everyday speech; 2) the first level is linguistic -- cognitive, represented by the thesaurus of personality (concept, word-symbols, images, parts of phrases). The speaker's values are built up through this communication; 3) motivational and pragmatic level -- the level of active and communicative needs, is determined by the lexicon of the person, cognitive activity, intellectual sphere, interests, motivations of the person. This level establishes appropriate conditions for real communication, the modeling within the limits of the speech needs of subjects of communication situations of shared cognitive activity.

The ability to speak is the ability to express thoughts communicatively, intelligently, and grammatically correct. The teaching of speaking in the absence of a language environment is characterized by a number of features.

Speaking should be:

1. Systematic.

2. Purposeful.

3. As close as possible to the conditions of reality.

4. Personally active.

In the process of verbal communication, there is an exchange of activities, information, experience, abilities, skills and the results of the activities, which is one of the necessary condition for the formation and development of the individual. That is why speech communication is oriented towards understanding of the purpose by other people of influencing on their consciousness and activity, on social interaction. In all aspects, verbal communication should ensure a high level of communicative skills, strength of influence.

A special section of the work on preparing students for verbal communication is the development of their communicative skills: a) the ability to transfer knowledge and skills that are known to the student, options for solving, communicating in the new situation, transforming them in accordance with specific conditions; b) the ability to find solutions to the communicative situation from a combination of ideas, knowledge, skills, techniques that are already known to the student; c) the ability to create new ways and design new techniques to solve a particular communicative situation. There are several groups of communicative skills:

1. The ability to focus on partners, i.e. determine the character of a person, his mood; to read the expression of the behavior of partners, correctly interpret it;

2. The ability to focus on relationships with possible partners and between them;

3. The ability to focus on a communicative situation. The importance of this skill is determined mainly by the fact that the rules of communication are dictated by that particular situation in which it occurs. The ability to focus on a situation involves first of all teaching the students to establish contacts in the current situation with partners that are desirable or necessary from a business point of view; the ability to create a situation of communication with specific partners; find the topics for communication in each of these cases.

The educational speech situation is understood as specially created conditions, circumstances, the system of student relationships for the purpose of educational impact on students in the implementation of speech actions in a foreign language. The role of the learning situation is to model a fragment of objective reality, which is correlated with the speech actions of partners, communication.

The educational speech situation allows, first, when acquainted with the new language material, to show clearly where, when, for what communication tasks, it is possible to use the presented material to realize by students what else they can understand and say in the studied language. As far as almost every lesson has an «increase» in vocabulary and grammar, the realization of this increase has great importance for creating a positive motivation.

Secondly, the educational and speech situation during the training allows ensure the personal participation of everyone in the listening and the use of the material being learned in the expressions when doing exercises in pairs, in a controlled speech conversation on conditions informal participation in communication. The educational situation should arouse the interest of students, the desire to engage in communication, the willingness to participate in it.

At the lesson of a foreign language there is scope for real communication. It occurs in the situation of acquaintance, discussing what is happening in the lives of students and teachers in the days that have passed between classes, events in our country and abroad. Since the teaching of English should promote the development of a foreign communicative competence that ensures the use of a foreign language in situations of formal and informal communication in the educational, social, cultural, professional spheres of communicative interaction, the focus is on the development of a culture of oral and written speech in English, increase of cultural knowledge about the image and lifestyles in English-speaking countries. For this purpose, both teaching and speech situations and role plays are used.

The success of the lesson is mostly determined by the motivation for learning effective communication. The development of motivation can occur through various tasks: conducting a role-playing game, group discussion; playing personal problems in communication, proposed by students.

Teachers of foreign languages face the task to adapt students socially and professionally and teach them to communicate in the socio-cultural sphere. Learning to communicate in the socio-cul- tural sphere is the training of oral communication first of all, and the last, as is known, is one of the urgent and complex problems of modern methodology. Since communication training should be aimed at realization of communicative intentions in speech, it is very important to create and use speech situations in foreign language lessons, since the situation largely determines the speech behavior of students. The creation of such situations in real communication is dictated by life itself, in the learning environment, there is only one real situation -- the learning situation, when the teacher and the learner communicate with the goal of teaching and learning something. In real life, people communicate under completely different circumstances, here hence the need to create natural situations in the learning process.

During our research we found out that the main reason for poor speaking skills of students was their reluctance to communicate for many reasons, including psychological discomfort and fear of making mistakes.

We will consider situations within the framework of imitating and simulating types of communication. Firstly, these are situations based on communication that imitates the reality. Simulating communication is necessary, since it not only prepares for fluency in communication, giving examples of implementing the most common communicative intentions in speech acts, but also introduces the socio-cultural aspect of communication, which is very important. Trainees get acquainted with the language means, fixed for certain speech acts. It is the situations created on the basis of imitative communication that lay the foundations of the communicative competence of students. Situations of imitative communication should depict typical natural situations in everyday life in the country of the studied language, or in our country, but with the participation of foreigners. It is necessary to give a detailed verbal description of the situation depicted, visual support is desirable.

The content of the training in the framework of simulating communication can be as follows:

-- Perception and reproduction of a certain act of communication, portrayed in a film, heard in a record or presented by a teacher, followed by an analysis of the communicative situation, linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of the implementation of the act of communication, and the controls of what was heard. In the process of training of situations, measures should be provided for the assimilation of certain resources, selected and complemented with stylistic variants. Reproduction of the source text is the final stage of the work.

-- Substitutions and compilation of dialogues by analogy (reconstruction of dialogues by response replicas, initiating replicas, by first and last replicas, etc.).

-- Drawing up a dialogue to the scene depicted in the picture. It must be noted the work with the so-called «talking pictures», when the trainee builds his statements either from a third person or from his own, as if he himself was the hero of the presented picture. In this case, it seems appropriate to use a video clip instead of a picture, that is, the situation is created and based on the viewed but not sounded small video fragment.

The use of a video snapshot expands the creative work of a foreign language teacher. Here we come across the following type of communication -- simulative. It is designed to recreate in the learning environment acts of real communication, which is very important for the formation of students' foreign language competence, since simulative (imitative) communication gives learners the opportunity to engage in natural life. It is an imitative, imaginary and played out reproduction of interpersonal contacts organized around a problem situation.

As methods of simulative communication, it is necessary to note the following:

-- Dramatization. The theme and the plot are set by the teacher, and the task of the trainees is to turn this into a speech.

-- A sketch. Prepares in advance, very often by the students themselves, a scene for the given problem situation with the characters, their social status, role behavior. When using this technique, a richer linguistic material is presented, since it is prepared in advance.

-- Role-playing game in comparison with the two previous methods is distinguished by freedom and spontaneity of speech and non-verbal behavior of the characters. Each participant in the course of the game independently organizes his behavior depending on the problem being solved, his communicative intention, the behavior of the partners.

Role-playing can be represented as one elementary communicative act (acquaintance, purchase, congratulation), and a complex communicative act consisting of a series of elementary, united by a common communicative goal and situation.

CONCLUSION

So, on the basis of the above, it can be argued that the use of speech situations is an important condition for the formation of a foreign language competence in teaching non-linguistic students, and when creating situations, great importance is given to simulative type of communication, which is confirmed by practice.

Thus, you can learn to communicate without using only your actual experience for this and you can do it with the help of the game. The game is a model of the life situation, in particular of communication, in the process of which a person acquires a certain experience. In addition, when making mistakes in the artificial situation of communication, a person does not feel the responsibility that is inevitable in real life. The purpose of the teacher's activity is to encourage students consciously and purposefully conduct educational activities, be guided by valuable motives, self-organization, self-adjustment for activities. The merger of the activities of the teacher and students, the fulfillment of the intended goal with a high result ensures the improvement of the educational process.

It seems important to add that before helping students to enhance their speaking ability any teacher should assess the reasons for the language barrier and choose the materials that will awake interest in learning English accordingly. But the main condition is confidence in one's own strength. It appears when a speaker ceases to concentrate on his mistakes in language practice. So to begin speaking any foreign language, one has to overcome his lack of confidence.

Some teachers allege that the language barrier does not exist, or that it was created by people. Everything depends on the ability to concentrate on the material and being a good listener. So, at the initial level one should listen and repeat as much as it's possible. The best way to express one's thoughts is by simple words and phrases. One can train the ability to understand the gist of speech using key words. More than that, it's more important to discuss interesting topics, it is necessary to use fairy-tales, poems, jokes, or to become a part of a situation where one should speak only the foreign language. And, of course, the conditions of communication should be comfortable.

In our opinion, whether the language barrier exists or not, we should try to overcome it. Otherwise, it will be impossible to enhance our speaking skills and become fluent in any foreign language.

The findings from this study also show that the main reason of poor speaking skills of students is their unwillingness to communicate due to many factors. We can conclude that willingness to communicate needs to be an important component of second language acquisition. So, the main suggestion is to overcome the language barrier and build a strong willingness to communicate. Only then it will be possible for the student to be a fluent speaker and not to be afraid of communicating in any situation.

REFERENCES

1. Shumin K. «Factors to Consider: Developing Adult EFL Students' Speaking Abilities», in Methodology in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

2. Vaysburd L.M. Tipologlya uchebno-rechevyih situatsiy / L.M. Vaysburd // Psihologopedagogicheskie problemyi intensivnogo obucheniya inostrannyim yazyikam. - M.: Prosveschenie, 1981. - 316 s.

3. Granmer D. Motivating High Level Learners / D. Granmer. - L.: Longman, 1996. - 123 p.

4. Hadfield Jill. Communication games / Jill Handfield. - Nelson, S. 1990.

5. Hedge T. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Размещено на Allbest.ru