V Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2013

While considering interactive instructional strategies to be innovative, it is necessary to keep in mind that any pedagogical technology will be dead if real people, who realize it, don't regard it as an integral system with the unity of components and interrelations. The essence of interactive technologies and strategies lies in constant active interaction of all its participants. In learning process, the organization of interactive learning process presupposes modeling of real-life situations, role-playing, mutual problem-solving.

Nowadays there exist a great number of technologies and techniques in language teaching underlying a particular set of teaching practices which can provide acquiring knowledge and skills of the language competence and to the atmosphere of cooperation during the teaching-learning process. But we'd like to focus attention on the use of such an innovative technology during the students' teaching practice as teaching English by means of music.

So, the most popular ways to use music as one of the interactive instructional strategies (such strategies employ group of learners) in the process of the students' teaching practice include the following activities. 1. Fill in the blank

This activity is a great way to use vocabulary and grammar in a new way. You can give the students the lyrics with some words or lines left out and have them try to fill in the blanks while listening to the song. A good technique is to write out of the lyrics on a flipchart or the blackboard and then replace the words you want to leave out with numbers. Then the students can simply write their answers next to the number on a sheet of paper. There are different ways to use this activity.

a. Fill in the blank just by listening to the song and filling in the lyrics.

b. Fill in the blanks in the lyrics from a word bank and then listen to the song.

c. Fill in the missing articles, pronouns, verbs, adjectives.

2. Strip Songs

This activity is aimed at checking reading comprehension and gives students the opportunity to make out what the text is about. It offers them a chance to hear native speakers using English.

1) Have students sit in groups and hand out the lyrics of complete songs to ec.ch group.

2) Lyrics should be cut into many different strips of paper with 2-3 lines of the song on each strip.

3) Have each group work together to guess the order of the lyrics.

4) Play the song and the students will listen to the correct order of the lyrics and make changes in their own version.

5) Finish up by making sure everyone has the correct order and then sing. Review new vocabulary and grammar structures.

3. Song puzzles

This activity is useful in helping students understand how to make up sentences. By reshuffling up the lines (or words within the lines) of a song and then asking them to fix them after listening to the song they have to pay attention to the way the words work together to make up a sentence. It's very useful to borrow speech patterns as a more natural way of speaking, as is know singers often use common phrases in their songs that cannot be found in a book.

4. Listen to the Music

Music is a way to introduce students to different ways of speaking and different accents while concentrating on the English language. It helps them understand spoken English rather than written.

Example:

a. Play the song and see how many words they can hear or how many sentences, then give them the lyrics for them to compare.

5. Imagine and Draw

This activity is designed to let the students listen and then use their English to speak about or write about the things they have imagined or drawn. It is good to use a song without lyrics otherwise students will focus on the words they hear and not on t¹^ content.

Thus, innovative interactive technology is becoming both more useful and more cost effective for many fields of teaching. The mage of music in teaching foreign languages, and English in particular, is a very important aspect in the organizing teaching process by the students as well as during their teaching practice at present. Musical technique helps not only to create favorable conditions for organizing teaching/learning process, but also to develop learners' knowledge and skills of vocabulary, grammar, phonetics.

It's a well-known fact that songs have been part of the human experience for as long as we can remember. Songs have become an integral part of our language experience, and if used in coordination with a language lesson they can be of great value. Songs are successful in developing the four skill areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking, and can be used: to present a topic, a language point, lexis, etc.; to practice a language point, lexis, etc.; to focus on common learner errors in a more direct way; to encourage extensive and intensive listening; to stimulate discussion of attitudes and feelings; to encourage creativity and use of imagination; to provide a relaxed classroom atmosphere; to bring variety and fun to learning. In other words, songs provide a break from classroom routine, and learning English through them develops a non-threatening classroom atmosphere in which the four language skills can be enhanced.

Poetry in a language lesson can be used as a good means to involve the learners in using their language skills in an active and creative way, and thus to develop their communicative competence. There are some reasons for using poetry in the language classroom. They are:

Educational and cultural values: language teachers are mainly educationalists, not mere instructors, and their duty is to contribute to the emotional, imaginative, intellectual and cultural development of their students. Poetry can enrich the content of a language lesson by providing excellent opportunities for the development of a "whole person" as well as of a language learner.

Practical reason: a poem is also viewed as the way of improving the students' knowledge of the language - grammar, vocabulary, rhythm, intonation, sounds. Teachers can exploit "unusual use" of the language of the poem for expanding the students' language awareness and interpretive skills.

Comprehension skills development: poems can give valuable opportunities for learners to develop such analytical skills as deduction of meaning from linguistic and situational context, prediction, interpretation of assumptions etc. The earlier the learners engage their intellect and imagination as well as their knowledge and memory, the sooner they will become truly literate in a target language.

Taking these reasons into consideration, we can arrive at the conclusion that poetry can be effectively used in the language classroom because this form of literature is emotional (can stir students' emotions), concentrated in form (much is expressed in a few words) and has figurative meaning (gives a good start for different points of view).

References

1.Longman Dictionaty of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. 3d Ed. - England: Pearson Education Limited, 2002. - 595 p. 2 Morska Lilia. Theory and Practice of English Teaching Methodology. - Temopil, 2003.~254p.

3. Seamster R., Harrison M. Music in the Classroom // Іноземні мови в навчальних закладах. - К., 2004. - № 3.-С. 67-70.

4. Wilen W. W., Kovtun О. М. Using Discussion Strategies to Actively Involve Students in the TEFL Classroom // Іноземні мови. - К.. 2004. - №2.-С.28-33.

5. Zubenko T. Integration in the educational process / Humanistic and Pragmatic TEFL. XII International Conference of the Educational Association of teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages in Ukraine, April 21-22, 2007. Abstracts. – Kyiv, 2007. – 122 p.

 

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