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АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ МЕТОДИКИ ПРЕПОДАВАНИЯ И РАЗВИТИЯ МЕЖКУЛЬТУРНОЙ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТИ УЧАЩЕЙСЯ МОЛОДЕЖИ
УДК 372.881.1
doi: 10.18101/1994-0866-2017-7-176-181
CLUES AS A MEANS OF FACILITATING MOTIVATION IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
© Ekaterina V. Barbakova
Cand. Sci. (Education), A/Prof.,
East-Siberian State University of Technology and Management 40 V Kluchevskaya St., Ulan-Ude 670013, Russia E-mail: buryatkatya@gmail.com
The article deals with the problems of motivation in teaching EFL in relation to а fundamental pedagogical trend — student-centered education providing favorable conditions for learner individual development. Such development can be realized through effective teaching strategies that influence over student motivation. The learner's motivation depends on how effectively the teacher is able to facilitate interest in students. Both intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation are examined to show strong positive correlation between teachers' motivational teaching practices and their learners' motivation. One of the efficient means of stimulating motivation is using clues in teaching. The article defines the status of clues in a broad and narrow sense in the training system, their characteristics as teaching aids in application to concrete types of language activity and types of clues. The clues have been determined and classified into textual, reader's thesaurus and technological as well. The technology of using these clues is demonstrated so as to show the role of different clues in fostering motivation and learner autonomy.
Keywords: student-centered education; motivation in teaching foreign languages; clues in EFL; clues classification; using clues in teaching English; clues in reading; effective reading.
Introduction
In the 21st century the fundamental pedagogical trend is student-oriented education aimed at personal enhancement, and its functions being humanitarian, culture focused and socializing [8]. Teaching process is to provide favorable conditions for learner individual development. Key aspects of such training are ability and willingness to learn, and students' development as a subject of the educational process. The logic and mechanism of pedagogical influence on student have been changed. Teacher activity is implied in such concepts as "help to student", "creating favorable conditions for learner development", "realization of personal potential", "self-enhancement", "learner autonomy" [6, 10].
In this context student's status changes from the object of training to the subject, so that equal partnership is created between the teacher and the student. All this has a direct impact on learner's personal qualities, his or her learning strategies and motivation.
Theoretical Foundation: Second Language Motivation
Motivation has always been a central issue in education and has been referred to as one of the most complex and challenging issues for teachers to face today. Teachers hope to discover a bunch of strategies and classroom activities that promote active learners, sustain and arouse motivation and increase English language competence. Attempting to address this issue, recent years' research has moved from simply defining motivation in the psychological schema to focusing on the development of practical motivation strategies for the ESL/EFL classroom. Dornyei and Csizer and other researchers hypothesized that situation-specific motives closely related to classroom reality played a far more significant role in the second language motivation complex than had been thought of earlier. In their study, they invented a list of ten macro strategies from a previously larger list of 51 strategies in order to find out how teachers viewed each strategy in terms of level of importance and how frequently they utilized each strategy in the classroom. While this study could not claim that each strategy would be productive for every classroom situation, cultural context and diverse learning settings, it can be rather productive in terms of presenting a useful starting tool for teachers to reappraise their own motivational practices.
Dornyei and Csizer revealed a new perspective on motivation research: their study grounded itself in the practical use and focused entirely on teachers' perspective of strategies. The final top ten macro strategies from Dornyei and Csizer are the following:
1. Set a personal example with your own behavior
2. Create a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom
3. Present the tasks properly
4. Develop a good relationship with the learners
5. Increase the learners' linguistic self-confidence
6. Make the language classes interesting
7. Promote learner autonomy
8. Personalize the learning process
9. Increase the learners' goal-orientedness
10.Familiarize learners with the target language culture [5].
The outlined strategies show what an important role motivation plays in language learning. In this perspective the ideas of Teh, Embi, Yusoff and Mahamod are very productive. They suppose that the teacher can facilitate learning and encourage motivating strategies among learners through improved implemented pedagogical techniques. Some researchers working in this field note that their research lacks a new perspective on specific strategies, it does reiterate the importance of strategies in both the teacher and student context [9]. Guilloteaux and Dornyei have found out a strong positive correlation between teachers' motivational teaching practices and their learners' motivation in the actual classroom. In the 2008 study, Guilloteaux and Dornyei highlighted the importance of effective teaching strategies and its influence over student motivation [5, 7].
According to Deniz, students' motivation is directly connected with how much effort the learner and teacher are willing to contribute in the classroom. Teachers can drive the direction of the classroom: factors such as interest, paying attention, making an effort, willingness to spend the required time on a task, not giving up when faced with challenges, strong willpower, being determined, and using strategies to achieve learning goals are important in motivation. As leaders in the classroom, teachers have the power and influence to affect students at every level of education and learning. A teacher who acts as a good role model and shows enthusiasm and interest in teaching can have a positive role in encouraging their students to learn and be motivated [4].
Here we can observe a two-sided phenomenon. On the one hand there is intrinsic motivation and on the other — extrinsic. Intrinsic one is born in students and extrinsic depends on teacher's inner qualities and professional competence. The learner's motivation depends on how effectively the teacher is able to facilitate interest in students.
Thinking about teacher's and student's learning strategies it is worth highlighting a very important idea, that a teacher should exercise a good command of professional skills and abilities which he can freely use in any teaching context. In other words these skills is an integral part of teacher's essence and they do constitute teaching competence. The qualitative characteristics of competence are to be realized through flexible teaching techniques / technologies / methods / strategies.
Theoretical Foundation: Clues
To represent a clue (prompt, support) as one of the means of facilitating student motivation it is necessary to understand its' status or position in teaching methodology. We suggest observing a clue from two perspectives: in the broad sense and in the narrow one.
Firstly, in a broad meaning any clue correlates with training activity in general and its' purpose is to help this activity to be successfully realized. In other words a clue is a support in the form of professional teaching aid throughout the educational process. Teaching activity loses in its meaning without providing support and help to the student. Secondly, a clue manifests itself in all components of the teaching system.
So a clue is connected with the educational purposes indirectly through setting conditions for achieving ultimate goals. Such training assumes gradual move from knowledge to skills and further to abilities. The organization of such training realizes the idea of professional and pedagogical help. Content of training is to be presented in the form of careful selection of a teaching material and its methodological interpretation. A clue is an important component of the training content and it is presented indirectly in the productive forms of speech activity and directly in receptive ones.
A clue is realized through implementing all educational principles (attainment and availability, stability, consciousness, activity, presentation, individualization) and teaching methods. Progressing from acquaintance with new material through training to its application in speech, in other words from knowledge acquisition to skills development, a student passes his way using the maximum number of offered clues through their gradual reduction to independent activity without any support / clues.
A clue is presented most obviously in the system of training aids / tools.
The above mentioned lets us treat a clue as methodological support and means of control at all levels of learning activity in a broad sense. Manifestation of such help can be obvious and hidden, explicit and implicit, direct and indirect, most developed and most reduced. A clue plays an important role in transition from didactic management to learner autonomy.
However it is important not to mix a concept of a clue and that of a stimulus. A clue has a stimulating function, but it isn't identical to stimulus. In addition to action motivation it contains a hint for realization of a program of actions. In other words, stimulus mainly belongs to motivational / stimulating stage of activity, a clue — to analytic-synthetic one.
Thus in a broad sense a clue represents methodological help in teaching and controlling activity, realized in each component of teaching system and aimed at transition from didactic management to learner autonomy.
In a narrow sense the essence of a clue is realized in the function of training aids / tools in application to concrete types of language activity. It is an informative support of verbal and non-verbal character which stimulates and develops communicative activity through instruction of different clue manifestation. However, it is necessary to add some specifications to this definition [1].
1. Clues are always informative and contained in a clue information can reveal support of various degree in respect of completeness, depth and accuracy: from a detailed program of actions to a hint. Some are more specific and they give more prompts by their form and content, other are more abstract, they demand further explication and therefore, higher level of verbal and cognitive activity.
2. Information, implicated in a clue limits search zone, prompts task solutions, i.e. helps to organize activity in a certain direction.
3. A clue stimulates activity. If support is not identified as the help by the student, then it does not achieve its guiding and stimulating goals.
4. A clue is always present in the process of communication. It can be explicitly or implicitly expressed. In case a clue is integrated it becomes a component of cognitive activity [2].
Interpreting a clue it is essential to take into account types of speech activity — productive and receptive. The difference is a text which is given to a recipient in the finished form in reading and listening. And it is to be created as a product in speaking and writing. In this regard clues are externally / explicitly expressed in a text for reading. They have to be identified and understood by learner, and to be transited into internal speech. As for teaching speaking an external clue is temporary, otherwise it becomes the factor which slows down skills development.
A reading clue can be defined as a methodological support aimed at stimulating reading comprehension and ensuring autonomous reading. In addition comprehension is reached by updating of the known / acquired to overcome difficulties while understanding unknown / new.
Practical application: Teaching strategy
Theoretical grounds for clue application in teaching foreign languages were elaborated in my research [3]. Clues were determined and classified into textual, reader's thesaurus and technological. So in teaching reading a course of studies can start with an introductory lecture about reading clues of different types. Further on the
students practice in finding and identifying textual clues such as headlines, the first and the last paragraphs, a topic, known words, metaphors etc. that any text has, for better understanding. At this stage of work on the text students are to use their background knowledge that is reader' thesaurus clues such as author's name, historic dates and events, own experience, concepts, images, facts, assumptions, frames, scripts, emotions, opinions, beliefs, stereotypes etc. to decode a text. To make the process of learning easier and the learning climate supportive technological clues are used. They are tools that a teacher creates. They can be presented as semantic maps, associagrams / mind maps, text schemes of different text types, tables, reading instructions etc. For instance, while reading students and a teacher can draw maps, which include semantically close words and then discuss what these words give to the meaning of the story. All these exercises arouse interest in students and this is the case when extrinsic motivation becomes intrinsic. In other words the technology of using clues is a means a teacher uses to stimulate extrinsic motivation and helps learners acquire clues and understand the essence of such prompts as an efficient tool for fostering reading comprehension.
Referring back to "Ten commandments of motivation" by Dornyei and Csizer we can now definitely state that the clues technology in question is in full adherence to all the goals described: setting a personal example with teacher's own behavior, creation of a pleasant atmosphere in the classroom, presenting the tasks properly, developing a good relationship with the learners, increase the learners' linguistic self-confidence, making the language classes interesting, promoting learner autonomy, personalizing the learning process, increasing the learners' goal-orientedness and familiarizing learners with the target language culture.
Conclusions
To conclude with the status of a clue, it is possible to consider it as a phenomenon of a wide methodological range as it represents the essence of training system and is present directly or indirectly in all its components, in the process of speech generation or perception, and is a means of facilitating extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and of learner's autonomy. More research is needed to help us shed more light on the complexity of motivational teaching strategy use, which influences the complex and dynamic construct of ESL motivation.
References
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ОПОРЫ КАК СРЕДСТВО ПОВЫШЕНИЯ МОТИВАЦИИ В ОБУЧЕНИИ АНГЛИЙСКОМУ ЯЗЫКУ (КАК ИНОСТРАННОМУ)
Барбакова Екатерина Владимировна кандидат педагогических наук, доцент,
Восточно-Сибирский государственный университет технологий и управления Россия, 670013, г. Улан-Удэ, ул. Ключевская, 40В E-mail: buryatkatya@gmail.com
В статье рассматриваются проблемы мотивации в обучении иностранным языкам в русле приоритетного личностно-ориентированного образования, предполагающего создание благоприятных условий для индивидуального развития обучаемого. Такое обучение подразумевает использование эффективных технологий, оказывающих положительное воздействие на мотивацию обучаемых. Мотивация обучаемого зависит от умений учителя повысить интерес к обучению. Рассмотрены два типа мотивации — внутренняя и внешняя, которые показывают тесную взаимозависимость между мотивацией ученика и используемыми в обучении приемами учителя. Одним из эффективных средств повышения мотивации является использование различных опор в учебном процессе. В обзорной части статьи рассматриваются виды опор, их статус, который определяется в широком и узком смыслах, и применительно к конкретным видам речевой деятельности. Определены типы опор — текстовые, тезауруса читателя и инструментальные. Автором продемонстрирована технология использования опор для повышения мотивации обучаемого и реализации личностно-ориентированного обучения.
Ключевые слова: личностно-ориентированнное обучение; мотивация в обучении иностранным языкам; опоры в обучении английскому языку как иностранному; классификация опор; использование опор в обучении английскому; опоры в обучении чтению; продуктивное чтение.
