Teaching English speaking at the beginning stage - Курсовая работа

Teaching English speaking at the beginning stage Introduction Every year in many parts of the world a considerable number of persons find themselves called upon to teach English to those whose mother tongue is not English. Their pupils may be children or adults; and range from those who already have some knowledge of English either in its spoken or written form to those who know not a single word of the language. The mother tongue of those who are about to engage in such teaching is usually English, but to some of them English is a foreign language in which they may or may not be proficient. But in either case they find themselves taking on a job which is unfamiliar to them. They have rarely been specially trained to teach English as a living language and as a means of immediate communication. If their pupils already have some knowledge of English, the teacher more often than not has recourse to a reading book, and causes his pupils to read - with or without the process of translation. Or, if a command of the spoken language is the objective, they content themselves with carrying on «conversation» with their pupils. In the latter case such teachers find themselves at a loss. The various techniques of teaching through conversation are usually unknown to them and, like the veterans who came into this field before them, they pick up the devices of oral teaching by dint of the process of trial and error. Our researching work is written to show that there are a lot of different ways of teaching speaking to children and adults on the beginning stage. There are The Oral Direct Method, Communicative Approach, Penny Ur’s Methods, Topic Approach and others. Also we consider our task to show how these methods work, so there are examples, which are in the practical part of the work. Our work consists of different tips, which can help teachers to work with children and adults. Psychological peculiarities of children and adults are describing in this work. The object of the work is teaching English speaking. The subject of the work is researching the theme at the beginning stage. The purpose of the researching is to study different methods of teaching English speaking at the beginning stage. The tasks are: - to study what is the speaking itself; - to study psychological peculiarities of children and adults; - to examine different techniques of teaching speaking; - to reveal how to deal with mistakes in oral speech. It is a well-known fact that when two persons, ignorant of each others language, find themselves in daily contact, with the necessity of communication by speech, either will soon become able to use the language of the other with sufficient proficiency for the purpose in view. We consider that the theme of the project is the one of the main themes of teaching English speaking because it is very important to teach oral English at the very beginning of the lessons to continue studying without difficult problems. 1. Teaching speaking 1.1 What should a teacher know about children 1.1.1 Principles of learning and language learning 1. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget(13) and his colleagues have demonstrated that children in primary or elementary school are usually in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development. This means that they learn through hands-on experiences and through manipulation of objects in the environment. Children in primary or elementary-school settings generally learn by doing. If this principle were extended to the English teaching setting, it would mean that children in language classes need to be active than passive; they need to be engaged in activities of which language is a part; they need to be working on meaningful tasks and use language o accomplish those tasks. So when the teacher wants to teach children how to speak he should not only show them how to do it but give them tasks and practical exercises. 2. This principle, which comes from the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (15), suggests that children need not only hands-on or direct experiences, but also experiences where they are interacting with and learning from others, both adults and other children. (1) Pic. 1. Principles of learning and language learning 1.1.2 How a teacher can develop the Communicative Competence Primary class teachers are only too aware of their responsibility in this area of foreign language acquisition and are anxious at all times that their pronunciation, intonation and rhythm are accurate, if only to ensure that the results of their teaching programs are validated and approved of by their secondary modern language specialist colleagues. Speaking is demanding of teacher and pupil alike. For the child it means discriminating between different speech sounds and being able to produce them correctly, building up new pronunciation habits and overcoming the bias of the first language, feeling the different stress patterns in the new language, having the confidence to hear themselves expres