Сдаем кандидатский экзамен. Учебное пособие

2.Моя специальность – романские языки.

3.Я работаю на кафедре русского языка.

4.Я работаю под руководством профессора N.

5.Я поступил в аспирантуру, так как я интересуюсь германскими языками.

6.Предметом моего исследования является морфологическая структура русских глаголов.

7.Эта проблема требует детального изучения.

8.Детальное и всестороннее исследование этого грамматического явления имеет особое значение для решения поставленных задач.

9.В первой главе необходимо сделать краткий обзор литературы по данному вопросу.

10.Лингвисты и филологи обсуждают особенности словообразования в романских языках.

11.Следующий вопрос касается классификации, которая бала предложена профессором N.

12.В своей работе я уделяю особое внимание этой про-

блеме.

13.Это исследование имеет большую практическую

ценность.

14.Результаты моего исследования вносят определенный вклад в теорию межкультурной коммуникации.

15.Путем сопоставительного анализа мы выявили типологическиесходстваиразличияанглийскихирусскихглаголов.

16.Новая концепция основывается на теории Б. Рассела.

17.Я опубликовал четыре статьи в научных журналах.

18.В прошлом году я принимал участие в международной научной конференции, которая была посвящена инновационным методам преподавания русского языка.

Exercise 2. Answer the following questions:

1.What is your name?

2.Where are you from?

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3.When did you graduate from the university?

4.Where did you study linguistics?

5.What is your speciality?

6.Why have you chosen this university for your postgraduate course?

7.Who is you supervisor?

8.What problems are you interested in?

9.How and where do you collect information for your the-

sis?

10.What are the aims of your thesis?

11.What is the practical value of your thesis?

12.Where do you prefer to get definite and detailed information on the subject of your study?

13.What scientific conferences have you taken part in?

14.How many published articles have you got?

15.What are you plans for the future?

Exercise 3.

Speak about yourself and give a short review of your thesis. Use active vocabulary and exercise 2 as a plan.

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PART IV

TEXTS FOR READING AND DISCUSSING

TEXT 1

Theoretical Preliminaries

(From “Parameters of Slavic Morphosintax”

by Steven Franks )

Generative grammar holds that the projection problem can be solved by postulating a sufficiently rich and specific language faculty. There is a complex dedicated system that enables children eventually to acquire a mature grammar solely on the basis of exposure to an unstructured and unreliable fragment of the adult language. It is this deficiency in the primary linguistic data that leads linguists to conclude that "much of the child's final ability is determined by genetically encoded principles, which are triggered or activated by environmental stimulus" (Hornstein and Lighffoot).

As pointed out by Hornstein and Lightfoot, there are really three aspects of the poverty of stimulus argument to be contended with. First of all, the speech a child is actually exposed to "does not consist uniformly of complete grammatical sentences," in that it is fraught with the effects of performance factors. Second, a child is ultimately "able to deal with an infinite range of novel sentences," far exceeding those that might in fact have been heard. These first two aspects, Hornstein and Lightfoot contend, would require an inductive theory of language acquisition to be extremely elaborate. Third, for much of what a speaker knows of the structure of his or her language, there is no evidence at all in the primary linguistic data. Linguists are able to devise complicated hypothetical sentences and elicit consistent grammatical

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judgments, even though the child in the course of acquiring a grammar may never have experienced similar sentences. This third aspect of the deficiency of data poses an insurmountable problem for any account of language "learning" based exclusively on experience, since the very evidence from which induction might be made is lacking. It is for this reason that linguists postulate a language faculty that embodies innate properties facilitating the acquisition of grammar.

The initial configuration of the language faculty is known as Universal Grammar (UG). As a "language acquisition device,"

to explain how they are able to construct a grammar relying on deficient data. The Principles and Parameters theory is one type of solution to this dilemma. In discovering the abstract principles of UG and establishing the ways in which they may be parameterized, however, one is of course torn between the desire to describe a wide range of phenomena and the need to explain such phenomena (cf. Chomsky). A model of grammar that can resolve this tension must have a rich deductive structure, with highly integrated principles and limited options. In this section, the basic properties of the GB framework, which aims to satisfy these criteria, are sketched out.

TEXT 2

Teaching English. Observations – why bother? (by Andy Baxter)

"Nice board work." This was a killer phrase back in the days before the invention of the interactive whiteboard. It normally sat, all alone, in the left hand column of a page divided by a vertical line, under the label "Good".

The right hand column was labelled "To Think About". And, even though you were just starting to learn how to teach,

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you couldn't help noticing that the number of entries that your Teacher Trainer had made in the "To Think About" section had overflowed into the bottom of the "Good" half, and sometimes even on to the back of the page.

It meant your lesson had been rubbish. Or rather, it meant that your lesson had been judged as rubbish. Because this phrase was, essentially, a code. To a novice teacher, it meant that you had written on the board in straight lines and not made any really bad spelling mistakes. But to the more experienced observer, the code was clear: the lesson was a stinker.

This may be an extreme example, but it does show how the notes from lesson observations do not necessarily mean what they say. Indeed, they will say one thing to one person (or set of people) and something quite different to another.

Why is this? And why does it matter?

Well, partly it is an example of groupthink. Trainers train trainers and those trainers become trainer trainers and so on: unless your organisation has seen a significant influx of new staff there will be a line of continuity. And unfortunately all those trainers will have the same belief: that they are describing the lesson they are observing.

They are not. They are, rather, demonstrating what they have been conditioned to see. To see this phenomenon in a different area of activity, let us look at the examples of football referees. Supporters criticize referees during games because the refs are discriminating against their club. And yet both sets of supporters feel this discrimination. Obviously, they can't both be right. In fact, I would suggest that they are both wrong. The referee is observing the game carefully. But he or she can only see half the action (even with the help of assistant referees). And, even then, they too have been subjected to groupthink. After every international match, football experts on TV complain that the referee comes from a country with different tolerances of physicality or dissent.

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In football, as in teaching, people want to remove the subjectivity. They want objectivity. In teaching recently, there has been more of a move to write descriptive observation notes rather than subjective ones. The notes should state what the teacher did – their behaviours – and not add commentary. But as we have seen with referees, what you (manage to) see is already a commentary in itself.

Can we make observation notes more useful?

I think we can. But to do that, we need to change their role. We need to make observations into a conversation. In teacher development, pointing out behaviours and asking questions should have the same effect as we hope it does in language teaching. If we ask noticing-type questions, we would hope that this leads to the learner/trainee asking themselves similar questions. So instead of writing "students do not seem engaged", we could ask "Why did Tina spend five minutes talking to John during the matching activity?"<…>

But what about experienced teachers? Here, too, we need to move towards conversations.

For example, we could decide to observe a lesson jointly prepared by observer and observee. How would this alter the observer's comments? How much responsibility for the successful and unsuccessful outcomes do they take? Perhaps we could add

by the observer, but delivered by the observee, what useful insights can be gained? What needs to be changed? Are the problems caused by the content, or the delivery, or the lesson structure, or even the fact it is being observed?

Or we could create an action-research aim, like why a particular piece of content doesn't seem to work in your school. Ask two or three teachers to observe each other teaching it, and work out why it doesn't work, or how it needs to be altered, or create some substitute content.

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With this investment in the observation, observation notes become useful. Yes, they can feed into the action-research process. But they have another role.

Many people ask "What is the point of observing teachers who've been in the classroom for years and years?" Are such observations simply part of the bureaucratic process? Something to put in their bulging personal files or shiny new Teacher Portfolio?

I would ask, when an observer gives an observee advice or suggestions, what does that advice say about their philosophy of teaching, of their attitude to learning by both learners and observee? Which half of the class do they see? What do they choose to comment on? What do they take as a given – what is "normal" for them?

Observations can tell us a lot – but they tell us a lot about the observer, rather than the class, or even the observee. In my view, the best – and only – place that an observation report should be kept is in the portfolio of the observer.

TEXT 3

Get lit up: literature as a teacher's best friend (www.fluent-english.ru)

Literature. Quite a divisive word, that. Throw it through an open window into a room full of language teachers and most will dive behind furniture, fingers in their ears and looks of horror on their faces. A few, possibly, will greet its arrival amongst them with a squeak of delight and start playing with it like a favourite pet.

A bit of an exaggeration? Not really. Most teachers of English as a foreign language will identify fairly readily with one group or the other, with those who would welcome the chance to use literature in the classroom and those who wouldn’t even think about it.

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