Lesson

Teacher training is seen as a student-centered activity not simply as the delivery of prescribed formulae. The learners are encouraged to develop the awareness of the teaching/learning process in class and outside school hours, on a group basis and individually. True group work is designed to make the members of the group interact and communicate with each other. The goal is for pupils to participate in a conversation, to swap information back and forth, to share knowledge, and to argue out strategies.

It is amazing how quickly even the most rigid pupils adapt to new techniques if they are introduced gradually with clear explanations or what is expected from them, and if the pupils have had a chance to work on a group basis. If teacher-pupil interaction is predominantly by way of display questions, relatively little real communication is going on.

Language is a social activity, and people learn languages primarily for social reasons. The class is a social unit and the motivation and satisfaction of the students depends largely on the attitude that the teacher builds up in his class. The good class is relaxed but intense, speaks up well, keeps together well in choral repetition, and enjoys a good, stiff workout. It has good stamina, and its morale is sustained by a sense of continuing achievement. It ends each session tired, but satisfied.

The lesson is a structural unit of teaching/learning process. As a form of instruction it is a completed, recurring (cyclically repeated) instructional and educative series of operations, deliberately undertaken) Every lesson reflects practical, instructional, educational, and developing aims.

1) The practical aim presupposes mastering a FL as a means of oral and written communication that is achieved through involvement of learners into oral and written activity.

2) The instructional aim is the expansion of erudition, development of the student’s intelligence, mental ability, power of learning and understanding, which is achieved when the learners work on teaching materials.

3) Working under the teacher’s guidance on some material, the learners add up to their knowledge about the country and its people. This work leads to forming new linguistic concepts; the pupils are encouraged to use their imagination and develop different types of memory.

There are three generally accepted kinds of memory that mainly concern teachers and students alike:

(1) the short-term memory;

(2) the operational memory;

(3) the long-term memory.

If the distinction between short-term and long-term memory is valid then it has a number of potential uses in the design of teaching methodology. It means that after a verbal input, there is a period of time when this input may remain immediately and unconditionally available for re-examination and for any kind of manipulation.

This length of time is neither too long nor too short for teachers to work within the classroom. In fact other kinds of evidence support the idea that verbal short-term memory is of about twenty seconds’ duration. The experience of simultaneous interpreters, skilled typists, telegraphers, and reporters supports this view. These workers normally produce their output — ­typed or spoken words -– several seconds behind the input they receive.

If the short-term memory is a dependable phenomenon, it means, on the one hand, that we should not expect our students to remember a new item for very long unless they have done something more with it than just heard it. On the other hand, our students and we need not panic when a new item is presented. The new item will remain at head for several seconds if it is not disturbed or replaced by further new inputs.

Other types of memory include:

1) kinaesthetic – is a memory of ideal representation of muscular effort;

2) motor memory;

3) auditory memory;

4) emotional memory;

5) verbal;

6) semantic;

7) procedural;

8) logical memory;

9) pictorial memory.

Memory, especially the auditory memory for sounds immediately after hearing them, is considered to be a major factor in language-learning ability. An analogy is seen in the learning of sound codes like those used in telegraphy. It has been shown that the difference in the time span of auditory comprehension distinguishes the beginner in telegraphy from the old-timer. Whereas the beginner can handle only one word at a time, the expert can deal with ten, keeping them all in his memory before deciding on the meaning of the utterance. And there is a conflicting evidence, however, on the role of rote memory in language learning.

Джерела:
Близнюк М.І. Курс лекцій з методики викладання англійської мови. – Чернівці: ЧДУ, 1999 – с.