Example 1

From the information given in the text and in the pictures, guess the meanings of the words underlined. [The picture is taken from 5. 119]

est.

a. This is a narrow street, b. This is a wider street, с This street is the wid-

Which is the narrowest street ? [The pictures are taken from 5, 119]

Fig. 5

Streets Example 2

Read the text and looking at the picture below try to guess the meanings of the words underlined.

Football is a game in which two teams of eleven players kick a round ball and try to score goals [75, 582].

Fig. 6 Kick the ball!

The technique of differentiating between homonymic grammatical suffixes, endings and forms

Find out what part of speech the underlined word belongs to.

The tram stops at the University. The tram stops are not far from the university.

The technique of using illogical statements

Find out the sentence having no logical mistake:

I. The lights are not visible in the sea. 2. The lights are not visible in the sea in the fog. 3.The plane, flying to Rome, was visible for an hour. 4. Microorganisms are visible only through the microscope.

The technique of live listening

It consists in teacher's story— telling. A teacher tells stories which provide excellent listening material. At any stage of the story telling students are asked to predict what is coming next or to describe the people of the story or to ex­press their comments in some other way [69, 215].

Listen to the text I'm going to read and be ready to answer some qualifying questions.

That year Dr. Headson was going to spend his sabbatical in Europe. Sabbati­cal is a special of vacation. It lasts a year. It is given to higher school teachers to enable them to travel and to undertake special studies.

In what country did Dr. Headson live ? How long was he going to be absent?

What do people do on sabbatical? What do you think Dr. Headson looked like?

Dr. Headson asked his nephew Paul to look after his house and gave him the key to the front door. Once Paul came to his uncle's house.

Why did Paul come to Dr. Headson's house? What do you think could Paul see in the house?

Paul started inspecting the house. An hour later he picked up the receiver and called Tim Cook, Dr's Headson's old friend. Some 20 minutes later the doorbell rang. Paul opened the door and saw Tim Cook.

Whom did Paul call? Why did Paul ask Tim to come? How did Paul look like? How old was Cook? Did Paul look nervous?

«Mr. Cook, I'm glad you've come. I'm Paul., Dr. Headson's nephew. Come in, please. Something terrible has happened.»

What do you think could have happened in the house after Dr. Headson's departure? Was Tom telling the truth or lying?

The technique of comprehensible input

Compresensible input is that amount of teacher's speech in the foreign language which in spite of including items unknown to learners can be under­stood by them. Some examples of comprehensible input technique are given below (the words unknown to students are given in bold) [73, 45].

/. The teacher starts a talk.

What's your name? — Ira. — Children, please look at Ira. She has fair hair. Her hair is short— cut. And my hair is long-cut. Her hair is not long. It is short."

Then the teacher involves students into communication.

"Let's talk together. Those who give full answers to my questions get three points. Those who give short answers get one point only. Let's see who the winner is.

"What is the name of this girl with fair short— hair? Where is the girl with

fair short-cut hair standing: on the right of the table or on the left of the table ?"

"Tell me the names of other students having short-cut fair hair". "What hair

does Nastya have: long-cut or short-cut?" "Is her hair fair or black?" "Take the

book and give it to a girl with fair short-cut hair. How many girls with black long-

cut hair can we see in the class-room ?" What kind of hair does your neighbour have? ""Tell your friend that Ira has short— cut fair hair." etc.

2. The teacher takes a notice of the learners' difficulty with understanding the word age, while reading ("The woman was still able to work at her age.")

Her/his actions are as follows: "Cheer up, in a moment you'll easily compre­hend the word. For example, I'm sixty, so my age is sixty.— How old are you? You are 18. So your age is 18. — And what is your mother's age? So, she is 40 years of age. Are you and your close friend of the same age? Ask Igor what age he is." etc.

3. I see you don't know what "colon" means. I'll try to explain it to you. There are many punctuation marks. You know that this one (,) is a comma. (And the teacher writes it on the chalkboard) That one (.) is a dot. (And the teacher writes a dot on the chalkboard). Now, tell me: Can we write a dot over a dot? Let's do it (:). Now you've written two dots in a colon. This punctuation mark is called a colon.

4. What's "afternoon "? Listen and you'll understand it. Afternoon is the time between the middle of the day and the beginning of the evening when the sun goes down, e.g.: In the morning I leave home and every afternoon I'm at school. But on Sunday afternoon at 12 a.m. I'm going to attend an afternoon concert in the Opera House. And at what time do you think babies have a sleep after dinner? What do people usually do in the afternoon of the 31^s' of December!

Comprehensible input of the teacher should be as rich as possible for it helps learners in understanding foreign language thus involving them into speech com­munication. Owing to it unknown lexical and grammatical items can be easily satiated with definite meaningful contents. It also helps the teacher solve some unexpected problems at the lesson and stimulate learners' guess-work [73, 51].

Comprehensible Input refers to utterances produced by the teacher that his learners understand based on the context in which they are used and on the language in which they are phrased. The means of application of Com­prehensible Input is plentiful exposure of learners to those utterances, i.e. to language in use. It gives them plenty of opportunities to use the language in real-life tasks or close-to— life communication. If teacher's comprehensible input is rich speech becomes clear without translation [73, 55].

There are a great lot of methods of teaching foreign languages, each hav­ing its specific methodological techniques. That's why in one text-book of a foreign language there can be used techniques tending toward different teaching methods.

The following two basic notions of methodology are the method and ap­proach, which are closely interconnected.

An approach is a dominating scientific idea of solving the main tasks of teaching. An approach is an axiom, a method is a procedure which shows how to implement the approach practically. For example:

1 .The Translation Method is based on the Translation Approach which says that to teach the language is possible only with the help of translation. That's why all the techniques and exercises of the Translation Method are connected with translation.

2. The Communicative Methods are based on the Communicative Ap­proach which says that to teach the language is possible only by means of teaching speech functions instead of linguistic laws. That's why all the tech­niques and exercises of the Communicative Method are connected with real-life speech tasks.

THE METHOD of teaching the foreign language is a purposeful system of teaching having a special design depending upon the approach within which the given method is.

THE GOAL OF EACH METHOD is forming and developing foreign lan­guage speech competence. It can be realized with the help of a certain kind of methodological techniques depending upon the approach the method is within.

Within one approach there can function many methods, e.g.:

l.The Translational Approach can be implemented by means of the Grammar-Translation Method, the Lexical-Translation Method and the Method of Conscious Translation.

2. The Communicative Approach can be carried out with the help of a great lot of methods, such as the Method of Communicative Language Teaching, The Method of Total Physical Response, the Silent Way Method, the Method of Community Language Learning, the Natural Approach Method etc.

In general, nowadays methodologists determine the wide-ranging classifi­cation of Foreign Language Teaching Approaches, the following list including the basic ones only: 1. Grammar-Translation Approach, 2. Direct Approach, 3.Reading Approach, 4.Audiolingual Approach (United States), 5. Pedagogic Functional Grammar Approach, 6.Oral-Situation Approach (Britain), 7.Cog­nitive Approach, 8.Affective-Humanistic Approach, 9.Comprehension-Based Approach, 10.Communicative Approach , ll.Integrative or Integrated Ap­proaches. [83; 2,302; 69,56; 45, 6;].

The dominating approach to teaching the foreign language since the second half of the 20-th century has been the Communicative Approach. According to it the leading role in teaching is to be given to teaching speech functions of

the language, i.e. natural assimilation of the foreign language through speech communicative activity. This approach states that it is possible to teach for­eign languages only by means of real-life communication. That's why in all the methods within the Communicative Approach there are used methodo­logical techniques and exercises activating real-life communication.

The methods derived from Communicative Approach are The Commu­nity Language Learning, The Method of Total Physical Response, the Silent Way, Suggestopedea and many others. One and the same idea, that of natural acquisition of a foreign language, underlies all these methods, however spe­cific techniques of each of them being different.

Integrated approaches in language teaching is a part of the Communi­cative Approach. They encourage developing in learners integrated skills in all four types of speech activity and in three language elements within the general framework of using language for learning as well as for communica­tion. Integrated skills should be interchangeably formed at one and the same language material. Content-based tasks can serve as an example of integrated approach. It assumes that language is best learned when it is used as a me­dium for learning something else, so students studying the English language can be suggested such courses as: How to keep to a healthy life style; How to improve communication skills etc. [1, 302; 38, 6; 47, 132].

In the twenty first century prominence in teaching foreign languages is going to be given to the integrated approaches.

Understanding of such methodological terms as "language habit" and "lan­guage skill" is very important for teachers.

When a person uses a language the following speech actions and opera­tions are performed in his/her mental codes: receiving information, selecting information, identifying information, forming grammatical forms, analyz­ing and further processing of linguistic information. At the level of the habit these actions and operations are rather rapid, but are not simultaneous. This is manifested in rather long pauses of hesitation, interjections and slow rate of speech. When we deal with the habit we see that language operations and actions are carried out automatically only to a certain degree. So, the habit is a rather automatic component of the process of producing and receiving language information by means of communication [2, 162].

The skill is a component of mental processing and producing language in­formation carried out in a highly automatic way. At the level of the skill the sound-motor image of the word, its sound-letter image and its meaning (or notion) are brought into correlation immediately. It results in no pauses of hesitation in speech and adding quick and normal tempo to it [2, 162]. The

functional difference between the habit and the skill can be better understood in the following example.

Suppose, a teacher has already trained his/her students in putting ques­tions. They have been trained for some class— hours. And now the students can role-play dialogues. The teacher notices that the habit of putting ques­tions has already been formed: in most cases the auxiliary verbs are used at their proper positions. Learners' minds are now rather rapid in their on-line operations of constructing interrogative utterances. Nevertheless, at the same time the teacher sees that reproducing the dialogue is somewhat unnatural: pauses of hesitation are frequent and long, the tempo and intonations are inadequate, the students are uncertain in choosing auxiliaries and so on. This means that their speech actions and operations with interrogative sentence are not at the level of the skill, they are at the level of the habit.

Hence, we can state that language habit and language skill function in in­separable connection. In a speech skill they are integrated in habits of differ­ent types, of different level of automaticity, fully automatic, partly automatic or non-automatic. It should be mentioned that nowadays in methodological literature abroad they don't use the term "habit" substituting it by the terms "sub-skills", "part skills", "micro-skills", etc. [18, 164].

By the language form or item we mean any language item which is to be either comprehended or memorized, explained, composed by learners, transformed or role-played, presented in the process of studying the English language. In other words, it can be a grammatical form or phenomenon, a phonemic phenomenon, a derived word, a lexical unit, a word-combination, or a dialogue or a text to comprehend or a dialogue to compose and role-play or a text to write or comprehend by listening.