Successful learning to directly understand the text depends on directions of the whole reading process. Students must own a variety of skills and abilities to achieve a translate understanding of texts. They must learn to quickly highlight familiar material in the text and use it to understand the general content.
The student should also be able to:
– Recognize the meaning of words from the context;
– Allocate language binders;
– Highlight supporting words that carry meaning;
– Learn international words;
– Recognize multi-valued lexemes.
Students should also be taught all methods of semantic analysis, the main means of penetrating the content of the text material, such as:
– Definition of the topic;
– Highlighting the main problem;
– A synthesis of facts, establishing a connection between them;
– Selection of the main and secondary information;
– Establishment of semantic centers, logical sequence messages;
– Understanding of the context;
– Content assessment.
One of the necessary and necessary conditions for effective reading is, as you know, vocabulary expansion. Along with the note that fast retrieval of information from the text depends not so much from knowing a lot of words, how much from how free the reader has the skill of “recognizing” a word in his grammatical and semantic context. Therefore, it is so important, especially at the beginning the stage of learning to read as a type of speech activity attention to expanding students' potential vocabulary.
When reading texts, in particular, according to home reading, students usually come across a lot of words, and an understanding of their meaning depends largely on how developed the reader is the skill of analyzing them derivational structure.
The same applies to exercises that are used when work on lexical or semantic equivalents. When working over lexical equivalents, “give synonyms for the following words». Tasks may be useful here.
The definition of a word or sentence containing an equivalent can be writing on the board, read aloud. You can also give cards to students with recorded sentences.
In the practice of teaching a foreign language is increasingly felt the need to teach not only language structures, but also the fact that «Lies behind the tongue», i.e. the culture of the country of the language being studied.
In culture, as a rule, emit:
– Informational or factual culture;
– Behavioral culture;
– A culture of achievement, achievement, which includes artistic and literary achievements, traditionally related to culture with a «capital letter».
When teaching a foreign language culture, according to V. V. Scallop, The following are the most important tasks:
– Determine the minimum amount of cultural material;
– Identify what kind of culture is consistent with the objectives of the study a foreign language in a specific learning situation;
– Select and present appropriate for the purposes of learning the language material;
– To form a concept in students that no culture not static;
– Involve them in “cultural” activities;
– To form with them the concept that there is more than one only English and the whole English family languages.
Cultural information today can be obtained from everywhere: from television programs, including English lessons (which can be recorded and shown in class), from radio programs that give us even the “English phrase of the day”, from newspapers that print in Russian, and in English materials devoted to various aspects the lives of English-speaking countries.
The question arises: how to introduce students to the regional geographic information? Practice shows that rather than lectures are needed here, but active involvement of students in steam room or group work, work on projects, etc. The task of the teacher is to find the most effective techniques, work with country studies material.
From the outset, it is advisable to offer students a variety of questionnaires, crosswords. It gives an idea of what they already know.
Students, what causes them the greatest interest. Interest in students causes work with geographical maps.
You can lie out in front of them maps of five countries. (UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and ask find the same names, the names of hyphenation, acquired in one of countries the word «New». You can ask students to tell which Associations have a mention of one or other geographical titles. Another task that requires the use of a geographical map, and also tourist brochures: imagine that you are traveling to the UK, but only for 3–4 days. What sights do you visit and why? We know how difficult it is to remember proper names, especially when conversation, when people introduce themselves to each other and then do not repeat your name. In addition, the interviewees, if they know well enough each other, begin to mention the pet names. In order to mastering your own names can introduce students to the 10 most common male and 10 most common female names and their diminutive variants.
During the game «Changing of the Name» participants — celebrities (pop stars, writers, poets, etc.) have in addition to proper name stage name, nickname or more names, aliases.
Of great interest is the work with proverbs, sayings.
The task is given: give five English / American sayings and find the corresponding Russian proverbs, sayings. Can write English / American proverbs on separate sheets of paper, sayings and corresponding Russian proverbs, sayings, cut sheets into strips and, dividing the class into 2 groups, distribute these strips to them, give the task to find a match. This does not exclude work with dictionaries of idiomatic expressions, phraseological units. Everything is known in comparing, and comparing, we learn more not only about others, but also about ourselves.
Continuing to compare, the author includes signs and culture symbols. For example, you can make pairs of cultural symbols Great Britain and the USA, divide the class into 2 groups and, just as with described above, ask students to find matches.
The signs of culture include stamps and coins of different countries.
It is discussed that they symbolize images on stamps and coins, which important aspects of the life of a country they reflect. Here too comparing what important aspects of life our brands and coins reflect countries.
Students are very interested in videos about the country. The language of study. Such films should not be long, otherwise.
Students will not be able to complete assignments given before watching a movie.
These tasks are: write down what geographical names sounded in the film (tell us about the associations associated with them), which names, respectively, you remember what was new for you. Wherein the class is divided into several groups and each group is working together on specific task.
You can also involve students in the design of a project: a group student chooses a historical period and makes a project for the name of this period (the project includes the main political events, the main historical figures of this period, including the name monarch / president, the main events of cultural life). This is not a complete list of methods of work with country study material. Also important are issues related to learning skills.
Using semantic context as an extension potential vocabulary. It is very important to target students from the very first steps.
It should be clearly demonstrated to the trainees that the reader not at all necessary every time you meet with an unfamiliar word refers to the dictionary. It is only necessary to be very attentive to context and know some simple “landmarks”. Knowledge of these “Landmarks” helps to more fully and deeper perceive the text, teaches working with the text as a whole, and not with individual words, which is absolutely necessary in developing the skill of reading as a kind of speech activities. It is also necessary to develop a skill to identify semantic links.
Between words. Typically, students hypothesize the content sentences, based on the meaning of words, without taking into account their semantic functions, combining and dividing words arbitrarily. Meanwhile right understanding the meaning of the sentence is determined not so much by the value a single word, how much its form and syntactic function, and then there is a grammatical context. The latter can be the form words, sequence of words in phrases, the presence or absence of article, preposition, etc.
The source material for all assignments must be text; since the purpose of learning is to develop recognition skill listed grammatical phenomena in the perception of information of the text. The lexical side of texts should not cause difficulties for students. The volume of lexical material learned earlier is quite sufficient to fill selected grammatical structures.
A prerequisite is also the exclusion of traditional training exercises, such as, for example, “form a passive form” and others. They are useless here. When processing the corresponding text material all tasks must provide for thinking student activities.
References:
- Milrud, R. P. Methods of teaching types of speech activity on foreign language. Guidelines. Tambov, 1995.
- Passov E. I. Methodical mastery of a foreign teacher language // Foreign languages in school. No. 6, 1984.
- Perkas S. V. Organization of individual reading in high school high school // Foreign languages in school. No. 3, 1998.
- Rogova G. V. Methods of teaching a foreign language in high school. Moscow, 1991.
