A lesson is the main organizational form of learning, the smallest unit of the learning process. A lesson is the main part of the learning process, at which specific practical, educational, upbringing and developmental tasks are implemented to ensure the achievement of ultimate goals. Both the learning process as a whole and the didactic cycles and blocks are realized using the lesson as a unit of the learning process. This means that a lesson of a foreign language as a unit necessarily embodies the basic qualities and properties of the whole, i.e. course of study. Both the process of teaching a foreign language as a whole and a separate lesson are distinguished by expediency and relative completeness. The integrity of a particular lesson is ensured by the totality of its parts, links, stages, which are necessarily connected by a “single axis”, “single rod”, “common canvas” and place in the lesson system, which also has a semantic, thematic rod, a developing plot, in the context of which the training material assimilated and applied.
The peculiarity of a foreign language lesson is that it is not an independent unit of the educational process, but a link in the chain of lessons. In this series of lessons, the dynamics of the educational process are carried out, what was the goal of the previous lesson becomes a means of the subsequent, which determines the close interconnection of the lessons and provides a progressive movement towards the final educational goals.
A foreign language lesson has its own specificity, which is determined by the content of the subject, the practical orientation of training and the fact that a foreign language acts not only as a goal, but also as a means of learning.
The main psychological, pedagogical and methodological requirements for the modern lesson of a foreign language are communicativeness, individualization of the learning process, speech orientation of tasks, situational learning, and novelty.
The basis for constructing a lesson is a set of scientific provisions that determine its features, structure, logic and methods of work. This set is called the methodological content of the lesson.
If you need to teach a person to communicate in a foreign language, then you need to learn this in a communication environment. This means that training should be organized in such a way that it is like a process of communication (communication). Only in this case will the transfer of formed skills and abilities be possible: the student will be able to act in real conditions.
Each of us was faced with the following phenomenon: a certain event excites a person, pushes him to speech, prompts him to express his opinion, but leaves the other indifferent.
One person reads adventure literature all his life and watches only detective and entertaining films, the other is prone to historical novels or love lyrics. This is because any person is an individual with all its inherent characteristics. In the process of teaching speech activity, personalization becomes extremely important, because there is no faceless speech, speech is always individual. It is closely connected with consciousness, with all the mental spheres of a person as a person. It is impossible to effectively teach speech activity without addressing the individuality of the student. Therefore, the teacher needs to study class students, their interests, characters, relationships, life experience, motivational sphere and much more, bringing all the data into a special chart – table — the methodological description of the class, which is used in preparing and conducting the lesson.
The difficulty lies in the fact that this knowledge needs to be used in determining the content of exercises and their organization. Not only the content of instruction, but also the same techniques and methods affect students differently depending on their individual characteristics.
For example, pair work will not have any effect if the interlocutors of this pair do not have sympathy for each other; it makes no sense to offer the class a task - to ask the student questions if his speech status in the team is low; do not adjust phlegmatic or offer an individual task to someone who is sociable by nature and likes to talk in a group. Customized assignments are convenient to ask at home. In this case, a combination of individual and group learning occurs: the student tells in the class what he learned at home. Since his comrades are not familiar with the content of his story, it is interesting to both them and the narrator.
Such work is also used as a voice charge in the lesson. All students take turns preparing stories about what they are interested in. A wide scope for individualization opens when learning to read. Here, as in teaching speaking, you need to have additional handouts. But no matter how the student is motivated and no matter how much he wants to speak, read something, i.e. complete the task, he must first of all know how this or that task is carried out, be able to complete it. For this, in communicative learning, the so-called subjective individualization is provided. It consists in the fact that students from the very first days need to be taught to perform different types of tasks, to learn to learn. The better the student will complete the tasks, the more successfully he will master the material, the faster he will reach the goal.
Speech orientation. Speech orientation primarily means the practical orientation of the lesson, as well as learning in general. It is generally accepted that one cannot, for example, learn to read, having only learned the rules of reading and having learned words, or speaking, - having learned only the rules of grammar. Practical speech activity should be devoted almost the entire time of the lesson. Each lesson should solve some specific practical problems and bring the student closer to his goal; not only the teacher, but also the students need to know which speech skill or what skill they will master by the end of the lesson. Speech orientation also means the speech character of all exercises. The student’s preoccupation with practical speech actions does not yet provide effective training, for the training of speech activity is possible only through actions of a speech nature. Speech orientation also presupposes the motivation of the utterance. A person always speaks not only purposefully, but also motivatedly, i.e. for the sake of something, for some reason.
The content in the lesson is also determined by the selection of techniques and exercises that exactly correspond to the tasks. By correspondence to tasks, we mean learning situations of communication for oral speech, and for reading, the nature of textual material. The educational situation is understood as specially created conditions, circumstances, and the system of interrelations of the interlocutors for the purpose of educational influence on students during the implementation of speech actions in a foreign language.
The training situation should be as adequate as possible to the real communication situation in which the mastered language phenomenon is used.
The educational situation should be extremely clear to students. This means: the task is clearly defined (what to ask, what to find out from the interlocutor, what to tell about, what needs to be proved, clarified, refuted, etc.). As a result, students know what is required of them, what they can or should do, since the assignment is provided with specific linguistic (words, phrases, structures) and speech (ready-made speech clichés) material acquired or acquired. The educational situation should contribute to the formation in schoolchildren of such qualities as responsibility for the assignment, accuracy and conscientiousness, should stimulate learning motivation, and arouse students' interest in the assignment and the desire to complete it.
So, the content of a foreign language lesson in terms of the development of oral speech is determined by precisely selected situations in accordance with the objectives of the lesson and the characteristics of the students, and, of course, the linguistic and speech material in this case becomes motivated, and its use becomes natural. The requirements for the content of the lesson require awareness of the material and actions with it, so that students see the point in completing assignments in the language being studied.
References:
- Rogova G.V., Vereshchagina I.N. The methodology of teaching English at the initial stage in educational institutions. M., 1998.
- Solovova E.N. Methods of teaching foreign languages: Basic course of lectures. M., 2002.
