Abstract:

In the context of today’s global informational society, a special importance is given to the knowledge of foreign languages. A wide range of interesting, new methods of teaching foreign languages at higher education institutions is offered. Our experience of working at a technical (not language oriented) higher education institution, teaching foreign languages in particular, has shown that new foreign language teaching methods should be developed, the kind of methods that target specifically those students who study for an engineering or technical degree.

In our article, we would like to briefly introduce the main innovative methods developed within our project. The fundamental motto of our foreign language teaching approach is teaching a foreign language through art. This new method consists of learning the English language through participating in plays and culturally-thematic performances executed in a foreign (English) language. This method has been implemented within our Language Art Studio that was created at our technical university in 2009. In the course of eight years, we have staged twenty five foreign language performances and shows. Our students, the future engineers, architects and machinery builders, were and are the actors in these productions.

The offered method can be tested on the basis of any foreign language.
The aim of this new foreign language teaching method is to provide expressive foreign (English) language skills on an innovatively new level.

The method’s student body is comprised of students studying for any technical degree, as well as all those interested in foreign languages. In regard to its content, the method presents a complex, systemic, communication-oriented foreign language learning concept (using English language as an example). Within the “English & Theatre” method, action is the main tool for learning and practicing the English language.

The new method incorporates the following elements:
1) cognitive reliance on the main elements of acting skills;
2) active development of not just cognitive abilities but also various psychophysical capabilities of the students (motor skills, voice and gesticulation training, etc.);
3) inclusion of the students’ emotional range, specificities of their psychophysical makeup, etc.;
4) the method is realized through a learn-and-play approach and is based on the following two interconnected elements: the language teaching per se, and acting craft, with the former being the goal and the latter an experimental platform, a foreign language learning tool;
5) providing an engaging, entertaining learning process is the focus of the new method, etc.

Teaching English language on the basis of the new method aims at introducing the linguistic materials (voice and speech, intonation, phonetics, articulation, etc.), on the one hand, and cultorological materials that present the basis for acquiring and absorbing the English vocabulary, the specificities of the language’s grammatical (morphological and syntaxical) structures, its emotive and esthetical content, on the other.

The new method of teaching the vocabulary of the English language also represents our foreign language teaching method’s innovative quality: the vocabulary is learned, in particular, through the heroes and heroines of the English language plays, legends, fairy tales, literary works, etc.

Keywords:

Modern education, foreign languages, new methods, English & Theatre, technical profile, act-ing skills, a learn-and-play approach, Language Art Studio.