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COMPETENCY-BASED APPROACH IN THE TRAINING OF FUTURE TEACHERS OF ENGLISH
S.F. Azizkhodzhayev
This article looks into some aspects for a competency-based approach to training future English teachers. The main components of teaching English have been. These include upbringing, development, education, and practical components. The article also reveals the main principles of the technique of the communicative method in English language teaching.
Key words: Competence, communicativeness, focus on speech, functionality, situationality, novelty, personal focus, modeling.
The key task of contemporary education in the Republic is to create conditions ensuring the high quality of professional training of future specialists. The development of future teachers' abilities to act and to be successful must become important objectives of education. Today, a teacher must be mobile, decisive, responsible, and capable of acquiring and using knowledge in unknown situations, and be capable of building communication with other people.
The competency-based approach is an objective phenomenon in education. Implementing the competency-based approach in training is caused by the accelerating worldwide processes of globalization and informatization. The concept of "a teacher's professional competence" expresses the unity of theoretical and practical preparedness in the holistic structure of one’s personality, and characterizes a person’s professionalism. One can mark out professional-informative, professional activity-related and professional-personal components in the structure of a teacher's professional competence. The professional-informative, or basic, component, presumes that the teacher has theoretical knowledge ensuring awareness in the process of the teacher's determining the content of his or her professional activity. The professional activity-oriented or practical component includes professional expertise and knowledge that was tested in action and mastered by the person as being the most efficient. The professional-personal component includes professional personal qualities determining the living philosophy and orientation of the teacher as a person, individual and a subject of activity.
The principal requirements of the competency-based approach are the development of educatees' spiritual sphere, the increase of humanitarian content of teaching, and the fulfillment of the upbringing and educational potential of a school subject in respect to each student's individuality. Like any other school subject, English must become a substantial personality-forming factor. The main objective of English language teaching at school is upbringing, development and education of students by the facilities of this subject.
The unity of all four components of English language teaching - the upbringing, developmental, educational and practical ones - is of paramount importance. The upbringing component of the objective comprises shaping a person’s social activity by the means inherent in English. Characteristic features in
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this situation are ideological conviction, feelings of patriotism and internationalism, commitment, independence, diligence and respect. The developmental component of the objective presumes the development of language skills, a speech communication culture, general scientific skills, and a sustainable interest in studying English. The educational component of the objective is to introduce the students to the culture of the country of the object language, to expand students' linguistic and philological competence, and their knowledge and area of thought. The practical component of the objective is training in oral and written English speech skills and expertise that ensure the students' principal cognitive and communicative needs.
The principal purpose of English as a school subject is embodied in the communicative objective of teaching communication in English as a totality of all its functions: the cognitive, regulatory, value oriented and etiquette ones. The activity-personality-communicative method is of paramount importance in the training of future English teachers, forming their professional competence.
The theory and practice of intense communicative teaching of foreign languages at higher educational institutions have been developed by A.G. Kitaigorodskaya. E.I. Passov considers conceptual components of the communicative method, and explains them in the following way: (a) unlike other school subjects, a foreign language is both the goal and the means of learning; (b) language is a means of communication, identification, socialization and introduction of an individual to the cultural values of the country of the object language; (c) mastering a foreign language differs from speaking one’s native one: in respect to the methods of mastering, information density in communication, inclusion of the language in the substantive-communicative activity, the totality of function being implemented; and the relation to the sensitive period of a child's speech development.
Communicative English language teaching must be activity-oriented. The utilization of the communicative method of teaching in the process of educating future English teachers must be based on the following main principles: (1) speech orientation. English must be taught through communication. Forming communicative competence is of paramount importance in the training of future English teachers. The basis for communicative competence is linguistic competence; (2) functional orientation. The functionality of training is ensured by communicative, functionally adequate behavior of the teacher and the students. This principle presumes students' understanding of the functionality of all the aspects of the object language; (3) situationality. Communicative teaching is carried out on the basis of situations. Situations are viewed as a system of relations. This is an integrative dynamic system of social, status, role-playing, activity-oriented and moral relations between the communication subjects; (4) novelty. This manifests itself in the various components of a lesson. This is the novelty of speech situation and the novelty of material utilization (its informational content). Novelty ensures repudiation of arbitrary memorizing of sayings, dialogs, texts, etc., develops speech production, heuristicity and productivity of students' speech skills, and arouses interest in learning and cognitive activity; (5) personal orientation of communication. Personal orientation permits one to take into account the individual parameters incidental to a person. It truly motivates students. It is
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both general communicative motivation based on the need and a situational one;
(6) modeling. The substantiveness of the educational aspect is ensured by modeling of the substantive side of communication in the process of various types of activity. The substantive side of communication consists of problems that are selected with regard to age-related and individual interests of students, as well as the types of activity they perform and intersubject links. Modeling is based on exercises.
Thereby, in the process of training a competent English language teacher, it is necessary to carry out a genuinely communicative teaching method, and to proceed from the main principles of this method.
Bibliography
1. Китайгородская Г.А. Методика интенсивного обучения иностранным языкам. - М. -1986. - 213 с.
2. Конышева А.В. Английский язык. Современные методы обучения / А.В. Конышева. -Минск: Тетра Системс. - 2007. - 452 с.
3. Пассов Е.И. Коммуникативное иноязычное образование: готовим к диалогу культур. -Минск: ООО «Лексис». - 2003. - 184 с.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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