Education of the republic of uzbekistan termez state university foreign philology faculty the department of foreign philology

CHAPTER I MASTERING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH PROFICIENCY

1. 
   MASTERING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH FLUENCY
   

The English teaching course, as a target language in the University training system of future specialists, aims to provide students with the opportunity to acquire communicative and professional foreign language competence. In our practice, we use a communicative approach which is based on the teaching model of appropriate social language through communication in real-life situations. It includes such parameters as motivation, purpose, informative value, novelty, pragmatism, functionality, and the nature of the interaction between a teacher and a student, as well as the system of speech means. The syllabus involves flexibility and diversity of learning tools, their consistency with the ultimate goal of training as well as the student’s social and personal needs. In this regard, the experience exchange of ICT application in teaching English to nonlinguistic students is quite relevant, especially in the period of society global informatization, content and learning goals revision and search for new ways of teaching methods development. Thus, the aim of our research is to find out the suitable ways of students’ foreign language fluency and proficiency development by means of ICT through a university English teaching course. A great many explanations have been put forward for taking into account the age, level, and goals of our students. In this section, we shall look at young beginners, and the ways to cope with their problems. Young students at the beginner level are naturally curious about all new things. Their minds and memories are uncluttered; they have no fear of the unknown. If they wish to connect with their peers, they may still be able to use non-verbal means of communication. It is interesting, children manage to play together, never feeling any language barriers. Amazingly, they can also retell, translate into their mother tongue what the other children are saying, relay the information to adults, regardless of the language in which it was first received. At a foreign language lesson with young learners, no matter which method we use, we come across the same problem: children tend to rely on the patterns of their native tongue (which they are also still learning to use correctly). On the other hand, once they learn a few words, they are ready to communicate, to talk. Poems and songs are extremely useful, as well as fairy-tales, short plays, cartoons, any and all kinds of visual aids. According to Daniels (Daniels, 2002), within a very short time, ICTs have become one of the basic building blocks of modern society. Nowadays, many countries regard understanding ICT and mastering the basic skills and concepts of ICT as a part of the education core, together with reading, writing and numeracy. Pelgrum and Law state that near the end of the 1980s, the term ‘computers’ was replaced by “IT” (information technology) signifying a shift of focus from computing technology to the capacity to store and retrieve information. This was followed by the introduction of the term “ICT” (information and communication technology) around 1992, when e-mail started to become available to the general public (Pelgrum, Law, 2003). Nowadays there are different interpretations of the term “ICT”. According to the United Nations report (1999), ICTs cover the Internet service provision, telecommunication equipment and services, information technology equipment and services, media and broadcasting, libraries and documentation centers, commercial information providers, network-based information services, and other related information and communication activities.
Differences exist between first language (L1) writing classrooms and second language (L2) ones, which are the obvious facts that TEFL teachers should be concerned with in planning and executing. The common goal of both younger and elder students sitting in the EFL classroom is to study the language but many adult learners seem to expect more since they desire to accomplish more practical goals, such as to conduct business in English, which is defined as instrumental motivation by Gradner and Lambert (Leki, 1992, p. 43). Thus, genre and content will be greatly colored by their impetus for study a foreign language and their life experiences drawn from outside the school. Caudery (1996, p. 17) summarizes the points of difference between the L1 teaching situation and the L2 one, i.e. delayed development in writing skill, limited knowledge of the language code, the complication in the composing process in-between two languages, different attitudes to error, diverse needs and goals to improve writing skills and culture-based differences. Therefore, two problems are related in the teaching of written English: One is to form grammatical sentences and the other is to fulfil a given rhetorical aim (Byrne, 1980, p. 172). The written works of the L2 learners might involve much more personal thoughts and attitudes rather than the plain imitating of others mechanically but the proper controlled and guided writing² is still the main task in teaching.
In order to help L2 learners write correctly and fluently, teachers should understand the aims and the process of their learning. Geist (1996, p. 51) summarizes three dimensions of learning, which are the acquisition of techniques and skills through observation and imitation, the gathering of experience by experimenting and trial and error and the acquisition of the knowledge of rules, a vocabulary and a systematic understanding via verbal explanation or instruction. Thus, what teachers need to do is to help learners find the real purposes to write, to show them how to do it, to give learners the internal impetus to reflect on their own and to evaluate and correct it at the right time. At the third lesson, the students have to arrange the actual debate. To facilitate the students’ activity, it is possible to prepare some prompt cards with different clichés for the debate. For example, agreement, disagreement, sharing and arguing anyone’s point of view. If it is possible you can simulate a TV studio in the classroom by moving chairs and tables around, creating spaces for each group and encouraging students to decorate them. If they have props, let them arrange everything and prepare for the programme. The main task of the presenters is to be in charge of the debate and everything what is happening. Sometimes, we practice recording the lesson for later playback.