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Activities to raise students' awareness of collocations.

1.Ask learners to underline chunks they can find in a text. It is helpful to give them different kinds of chunks to look for. 2.Small extracts from the concordances published by Cobuild can be used to explore the possible environments of a word. However, ready-made concordances would be more suitable for higher levels because they do not include enough context for lower level learners to understand the meaning without help. 3.After they have read a text, learners can be given a set of incomplete phrases taken from the text and asked to complete them by scanning the text again.Imagine that your intermediate students have read a text on time management. Some possible incomplete phrases from the text could be: on time; in time; on the dot; at times; from time to time. These phrases focus on a preposition + noun collocation. 4. After they have seen certain collocations in a text, learners can be asked to find pairs of collocations arranged randomly. If the students have read a text on traffic, a possible matching activity could be: 1. Traffic a. jam. 2. Rush b.hour. 5. To encourage student autonomy, have students do dictionary work to find certain collocations. 6. Give students phrases in their native language and equivalent phrases in English, and ask students to match the phrases. This activity will help students see that collocational ideas are not always formed in the same way in English.

Aims of foreign language teaching.

There are three aims of foreign language teaching: 1) Practical aim: the pupils should acquire a language as the means of communication; they should be able to hear, speak, read, write in a foreign language. Pupils should be able to carry on a conversation in a target language, to read the text with complete comprehension; 2) Educational aim: by learning a language pupils extend their knowledge of phonic, graphic, structural and semantic aspects of the language through contrastive analysis of language phenomena. Pupils develop their memory, imagination, will power; 3) Cultural aim: pupils get acquainted with the life, customs, and traditions of the people through reading different texts, books, listening to audio cassettes, viewing tapes, and other visual materials.

An overview of English Language Approaches. Historical background.

A glance back in history reveals few if any research-based language teaching methods prior to the 20th century. In the Western world, “foreign” language learning in schools was synonymous with the learning of Latin or Greek. They were taught by means of classical method: focus on grammatical rules, memorization of vocabulary,of various declensions and conjugations, translation of texts, doing written exercises. The classical languages, first Greek then Latin, were used as lingua francas. They were widely used in philosophy, religion, politics, and business.Various European vernaculars (национальные языки) had begun to rise in prestige and utility. The most famous language teacher and methodologist of this period is Johann Amos Comenius, a Czech scholar and teacher, who published books about his teaching techniques between 1631 & 1658. Some of the techniques that Comenius used and espoused were the following: - Use imitation instead of rules to teach a language; - Use a limited vocabulary initially; - Help your students practice reading and speaking; - Teach language through pictures to make it meaningful.The beginning of the 19th century, the analytical Grammar-Translation Approach became firmly entrenched as the method for teaching not only Latin, but, by extension modern languages as well. It was codified in the work of Carl Ploetz, who had a tremendous influence on the language teaching profession during his lifetime and afterwards . By the end of the 19th century language had began to function as a viable alternative to Grammar- Translation Method. Francois Gouin, a Frenchman, is an advocate of this method. He advocated that had espoused the notion that a language cannot be taught, one can only create conditions for learning to take place. Henry Sweet, Wilhelm Vietor and Paul Passy,they developed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) . These phoneticians advocated principles such as the following: - language teachers must have solid training in phonetics; - learners must have phonetic training to establish good speech habits. 1940s, when the World War II broke out and made it imperative for the US military to quickly and efficiently teach Foreign Language learners how to speak and understand a language. There are four other discernable approaches to FLT that developed and were widely used during the final quarter of the 20th century. Before listing the features of each approach let’s clarify some terminology that is crucial to this discussion. An approach to language teaching is something that reflects a certain model or research paradigm, a theory. - A method is a set of procedures, a system that spells out rather precisely how to teach a SL. - A technique is a classroom device or activity. It is the narrowest of the three concepts. The most problematic of Anthony’s three terms is Method. Methods proliferated in the 1970s. They were almost always developed and defined by one person. Here are some methods and their originators: - Silent way (Gattegno 1976); - Community language learning (Curran, 1976); - Total Physical Response (Asher, 1977); . Many educators argued that there is no such thing as the best “method”.

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Communicative competence.

New wave of interest characterizes the 1980s, a focus on communicative language teaching for the ultimate goal of communication with native speakers. Such a focus has centered on speaking and listening skills, on writing for specific communicative purposes, and on-'"authentic" reading texts. Underlying the communicative language teaching movement are a number of important theoretical principles of language behavior." Communicative Competence is the "aspect of competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning interpersonally within specific contexts. Canale and Swam defined four different components, or subcategories, that make up communicative competence: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic. The first two components reflect the use of the linguistic system itself: Grammatical competence "encompasses: knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology." The second subcategory is discourse competence. This is the ability to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. The last two components define the functional aspect of communication. This type of competence requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interaction." The fourth component is strategic competence. Swain and Canale define strategic competence as "the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variable or due to insufficient competence.In a conversation, the speaker must first get the attention of the listener, then nominate a topic. Next, he must develop the topic. As he develops the topic, he must take turns listening and speaking, ask for clarification, and avoid certain topics and interruptions. When it is time to end the topic, he must know how to terminate the topic. Another important issue in describing communication is speech registers depending upon the context of communication in terms of subject matter, audience, occasion, shared experience, and purpose of communication. The communication can be informal or formal or intimate. Finally, nonverbal aspects of language play a very important role in communication. This is particularly true in social contexts, when it is not what you say that is important but how you say it-what you convey with your body language, gestures, eye contact, physical distance, and other nonverbal messages.