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114TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN A TECHNICAL
UNIVERSITY
R.I. Nazarov1
This article is devoted to the specifics of teaching a foreign language at a technical university. The article discusses in detail the problems of teaching a foreign language on the example of a technical university and the search for ways to solve them, gives practical recommendations on teaching methods. Attention is focused on new technologies in teaching a foreign language.
Key words: learning process, necessary, the goal, resources, technologies.
A foreign language is objectively a social value, therefore its inclusion in the program of secondary school and university is a social order of society. Today, teachers of non-linguistic universities have new opportunities to improve the forms and methods of teaching foreign languages. In the conditions of modern technical education, the problem of training specialists with a good knowledge of a foreign language is particularly acute. Firstly, this is due to the fact that students entering the university for technical specialties do not pass a foreign language as an introductory one and, as a result, most of them do not have sufficient knowledge in this field; secondly, a technical university, preferring professional disciplines, is forced to limit humanitarian subjects in hours, which negatively affects the final result of the development of the latter. In this regard, the teaching of a foreign language as a discipline requiring practical application becomes especially vulnerable due to the lack of a foreign language communication environment, application features (the difference between native and foreign languages often causes difficulties in the learning process) and often a low level of basic foreign language skills when entering a university. The interest of students at the initial stage, as a rule, is very high, and the teacher faces the task of maintaining it by widely attracting the latest textbooks and relevant additional material, as well as using modern techniques that stimulate interaction between participants in the educational process. Teaching students of non-linguistic universities a foreign language, the teacher faces the main problems regulating this process, for example, setting tasks for choosing teaching methods and, accordingly, the selection of material. Mastering students not only the skills and abilities of the language structure, but also providing information about the cultural and historical experience of the country of the language being studied is a significant goal in teaching a foreign language. Passov E.I., Vinogradov V.S. and other researchers proposed the following stages: the study of language theory, the formation of foreign language speech, the ability to apply a foreign language in practice, the improvement of dialogic speech. The difficulties are explained by the traditional methodology and practice of organizational forms of teaching a foreign language. The main characteristics of intercultural communication depend on the level of foreign language proficiency, on the degree of development of foreign language communicative competence.
Modern methods and techniques of teaching foreign languages, including the use of multimedia tools in the teaching process - audio and video equipment, training computer programs, the use of interactive training courses meets the goals set in performing the tasks of teaching a foreign language, contributes to the selection of the most modern methods and techniques, using media tools that make it possible to get an idea of the country, its traditions, etc., to communicate with native speakers of the language being studied. The most effective use of methods, techniques and methods of organizing communicative communication is possible if they are systematized. Furthermore, working with the Moodle system helps to increase remarkably time and the intensity level of communication in the learning environment. Clever variety of activity forms ensures that the system user can always find what to do: visit a forum,
1 Nazarov Rustam Irkinovich - English teacher, Tashkent state transport University.
study and assess an assignment performed by another user, open a project page and leave their comment. The main condition of a successful cooperation is by no means to use only a foreign language as a default language at the virtual class. Teachers and students should have enough time for communication outside the class, and the course materials should be arranged in such a way, that the work is varied and interesting (implementing audio and video files, podcasts, maximum of interactive forms such as wiki-projects, data bases, forums and others. Multimedia content formats can also be integrated from external sits - YouTube video, flash-animation, slide show and presentation etc. One of the means of ICT in a technical university can be presentations. The main purpose of presentations is to visualize training material. Multimedia presentation is a qualitatively new approach in the study of a foreign language. To prepare such a presentation, the student must conduct research work, use a large number of information sources, which avoids templates and turns each work into a product of individual creativity. The presentation can be classified as follows:
1) illustrative (usually comes down to a demonstration of new educational material);
2) interactive (this type of presentation allows students to actively participate in the discussion of educational material: express their point of view on a given topic, conduct group discussions, etc.; consolidate knowledge and skills on topics already covered (for example, performing lexical and grammar tasks, both in a group and individually).
The presentation allows students to form communicative competencies among students of a technical university, which is the basis for teaching a foreign language. To date, the most versatile technical training tool is the electronic interactive whiteboard SMART Board. Electronic interactive whiteboards are an effective way of introducing electronic content of educational material and multimedia materials into the learning process. The lesson material clearly emerges on the screen of the interactive whiteboard and aims each student at active fruitful activity. Offering students authentic texts of professional orientation for studying the vocabulary and grammatical forms of a foreign language, the curriculum gives them the opportunity to continue their studies in a master's or postgraduate course, to communicate with foreign colleagues in the professional field. Every foreign language teacher makes a difficult task today, as it is very difficult to teach language learning strategies. Teachers who use methods of forming strategies for learning a foreign language in their work are focused on the needs of the student, they do not manipulate students, but stimulate them to form and use their own strategies. The implementation of such strategies in the educational process creates favorable conditions for the active, creative and productive activities of future specialists in higher education and forms effective teaching and learning of a foreign language. In a non-linguistic university, a foreign language is not put "at the forefront", the largest number of hours is traditionally given to subjects of an engineering specialty. With such a ratio of the number of hours in a foreign language and core subjects, the communicative goal will not be fully achieved. In order to broaden the horizons of students, increase their general cultural level, which in turn will increase the importance of independent work of students and causes the creation of such a package of tasks, the implementation of which requires the use of a personal computer, that is, we focus not on classroom work, but on extracurricular -independent - work at home.
Based on the above, it is important to note that there is a need to develop such training programs for students of non-linguistic specialties that would allow them to train their professional ability to build conversational speech based on the interaction of various approaches and teaching methods on the materials of high-quality authentic educational tools. This means that by the end of studying a foreign language course, students should have a fairly well-formed lexicon, that is, the skills and proficiency in grammar, vocabulary, phonetics that they already had at the beginning of their studies at the university (obtained at school, technical school) and improved during university studies, as well as a thesaurus as part of the overall "picture of the world". Knowledge of the specific personality traits of the future engineer contributes to purposeful work on improving language, speech, socio-cultural and professional competencies, that is, the formation of an effective professional language personality.
Below are some types of creative tasks that are aimed at the formation of mental independence and cognitive activity of students.
Activity 1."Find an extra word." This task is aimed at logical analysis and the ability to highlight the main thing and "weed out" unnecessary, superfluous. For example, a number of words are given in which one is clearly superfluous either in meaning or grammatical features.
Task 1: metal, wood, glass, plastic, sand, thunder.
Task 2: wood, forest, timber, lumber, sand.
Task 3: wind, snow, rain, thunder, sun, glass
Activity 2."Find a generalizing word." This task is aimed at logical analysis, the ability to highlight the main thing, to make generalizations. It is recommended to use such tasks already at an advanced stage of training, when working with terms and professional vocabulary.
Task1: metal, wood, glass, plastic, element.
Task2: sawn wood, timber, lumber, veneer, wood material.
Task 3: wind, snow, rain, thunder, sun, weather.
Activity 3."Traveling together." The goal is to gain new knowledge on one of the lexical topics: "How to get to...?", "Towns and countries", "My native town", "Uzbekistan", "English-speaking countries", "Traveling", "Transport", as well as acquire the skills necessary to find new information. Such a task can be carried out in a playful way or in the form of a presentation. Students especially like to "travel" to countries they have not yet visited, but which they would very much like to visit. There are huge opportunities for individual creativity of both the students themselves and joint educational activities.
Activities implemented via new technologies are meant to engage and foster the student's own sense of agency. Consequently, the student is not perceived as a passive consumer of knowledge, but rather an active and responsible learner, engaged in collaboration and information sharing in a resource-rich environment within and beyond the classroom. The formation of a student's mental independence in educational activities contributes to a more effective mastery of educational material, stimulates cognitive and professional interests, contributes to the growth of motivation to learn a foreign language. Thus, it can be concluded that the qualitative assimilation of English in non-linguistic universities should be conditioned by the general objectives of the content, methods, means, as well as educational activities in the field of language practice and harmonious teamwork in the educational team. It is necessary to develop students' interest in independent work, self-control abilities, the ability to evaluate their own activities in the learning process and at the end of studying the program material, using different types of control by the teacher, to provide students and teachers with materials from various information sources: Internet resources, information from international sources - the latest methodological developments, encyclopedic publications, dictionaries of various subjects, from websites with materials of professional language teaching, to develop socio-cultural knowledge. All these methods will help to fulfill the goals and objectives presented by the social order of the society to specialists of technical specialties. The correct organization of educational activities should be implemented taking into account the needs of students themselves in mastering new knowledge, spiritual values, awakening interest in the culture of other peoples, and at the same time it should be directly related to setting a specific educational task for students, the solution of which requires creative experimentation.
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© R.I. Nazarov, 2022.
