Students are to be divided into three groups to present Kazakhstan, the USA, and the UK.

There is a Conference devoted to the “The priorities and perspectives of linguistic education in Kazakhstan, the USA, and the UK. The problem that is discussed is an appropriate age when children should study foreign language. British insist on the age 9-11, in America it is 11, in Kazakhstan it is 8. Give your reasons for the choice in each country and discuss the most appropriate age to start learning foreign language using arguments to prove it.

The Agenda.

1. The chairperson will bring everybody up to date on the problem to be discussed (5min.).

2. Each person will be invited to put forward his/her views on this situation (5min.).

3. A general discussion period will follow, where each member will put forward suggestions and recommendations to help to reach a satisfactory compromise (20 min.).

3 Talk about comprehensive schools, international schools, Nazarbaev Intellectual Schools in the Republic of Kazakhstan; then prepare a report outlining the structure and organization of education/foreign languages education in these types of schools? Create a chart to illustrate your studies.

A PROJECT

Foreign Language Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan

1 INTRO:

1. What do you know about the Bologna Process and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages?
2. What levels (A1-C1) correspond to the stages of Foreign Language Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan?

2 TASK: Analyse the necessary documents and prepare a presentation about the peculiarities of the foreign language education in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

3 PROCESS: Study the resources, conduct the survey, synthesise the results of the study. What is the structure of the foreign language education in the Republic of Kazakhstan?

4 EVALUATION: Use the ‘Evaluation Rubrics’ toevaluate the results of your research.
RESOURCES: You may analyse documents of the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’, the ‘Concept of Foreign Language Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan’, compare the European classification of language levels and the classification of language levels according to the cognitive lingua-cultural methodology in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

5 CONCLUSION: Present the results of your analysis and research in class (e.g. a brochure, a poster, a report, a video report, etc.).

READING

1 Look through the text and say which of the following might be the main idea of the author:

1. The foreign language teaching in the U.S. depends on the number of the theory textbooks American teachers read.
2. American teachers do not know an appropriate approach of “how to teach”.
3. The foreign language teacher should take into account language differences.

“About Foreign Language Teaching”

In our system of education, modern foreign languages appear as a hothouse growth, and as one that is neither wisely planted nor well tended. Two, three, or four years of French, German, or Spanish in high school and perhaps a few more in college produce no sensible result. The alumnus neither speaks nor understands his foreign language; he has learned to decode short stories and novels by thumbing a glossary, but a wise instinct leads him to drop this occupation as soon as he has completed his course of study. It would be of little interest here to describe the reasons for this failure. What we know about language has been learned since the beginning of the nineteenth century, but our schools still adhere to the traditions of an earlier time. It is safe to say that not one in a hundred of our teachers of foreign languages has read such books as Henry Sweet’s “Practical Study of Languages,” Otto Jespersen’s “How To Teach a Foreign Language,” Harold E. Palmer’s “Principles of Language Study,” or, for that matter, any respectable handbook of linguistics. The fault lies not with the teachers but in their training and direction, which is entirely in the hands of educationists and professors of literature.

Improved methods of communication and travel and the exigencies of war have confronted us with the need for foreign languages. In such things there is a lag until pressure results in a shock. In the year 1941 officials of our government saw that we should need men who could speak various foreign languages; we could no longer depend on outsiders.

At ordinary conversational speed, a foreign language sounds rapid, blurred, and vague. Some essential distinctions of sound escape the learner because they are absent in his language. A German, for instance, cannot at first hear the difference between English words like bag and back; in the same way, we are likely to miss such essential features as the tonal distinctions in Swedish or Chinese or the distinctions of plain and nasalized vowels in French. For the most part, both in hearing and reproducing a foreign language, we are likely to replace the foreign sounds by the nearest sounds of our language.

The first task of the instructor, accordingly, is to awaken the students to the foreign sounds, to train them to imitate exactly, and to point out elusive distinctions. When this is done, some students are able to mimic, but others cannot: one has to show them in the new positions and movements. For all this, of course, the instructor must be competent in phonetics – that is, he must know how speech sounds are produced.

The second task of the instructor is to choose the phrases which are to be learned. These should be natural, beginning with the commonest and most useful expressions, such as greetings, formulas of courtesy, and requests for food, drink, or information. Strangely enough, this is not always evident to persons untrained in linguistics; thus, some of our conventional elementary textbooks for foreign languages begin with bizarre and unusual discourses, such as telling of a child’s table in stilted literary language.

“About foreign Language Teaching” by Leonard Bloomfield. The Yale Review, Volume 34

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14