Abstract:

The modern methodology of teaching foreign languages has turned decisively to communication and communicative methods. Communicative techniques of teaching a foreign language imply using activities of a communicative character and are aimed at building communicative competence. This approach enables to treat a communicative method as the method teaching the process of communication rather than the language itself, in other words the studying process becomes a model (reconstruction) of a process of communication.

Speaking of the modal verbs of the English language, it is noteworthy that they are frequent in various functional styles and are multifunctional which causes difficulty for foreign students studying English modals. Thus it is important to pay special attention to this aspect of studying the English language at all stages, including secondary and higher education.

The research objective is to evaluate the role of the type of communicative situation in teaching the modals of the English language at higher education institutions. The research methods include analysis of literature on linguistics, pedagogy and methodology, approbation of communicative techniques of teaching, pedagogic experiment and statistic methods of research data processing.

The research was carried out on the basis of Naberezhnye Chelny State Pedadogic University. The research involved the third course students of the foreign languages department. The comparison of the results of the experimental group oriented on a communicative approach and the control group taught by using traditional techniques enables to confirm the communicative methods to be more effective thus leading us to the conclusion that communicative situation types are to be considered important while studying English modals.

Keywords:

The English language, foreign languages study, modal verbs, communicative situation, communicative method.