ACTIVITY APPROACH TO TEACHING: REQUIREMENTS AND REALITY

The article provided a scrutiny of the activity approach as the method to develop the communicative universal learning skills among ESP students. The article tackles the problem of efficient methods implementation in the development of the communicative and social competence according to the Federal educational standard of the Russian Federation. The study was aimed at justifying the authors’ concept of effective organization of the educational process in the course of the English language as a foreign language learning based on the activity approach.

The students were divided into two groups – the control and the experimental one. Students of the control group were taught with no emphasis on the activity approach forms of work, in the experimental group the focus was on project drafting, self-assessment, mutual assessment, reflection, indicative framework for actions formation and other methods of the activity approach techniques. Motivation for learning and speaking increased in the experimental group and in the control group it remained at the same level. Further on the test for the perception of experimental activities in the experimental group was carried out. The results showed a contradictory attitude: students liked the approach, but it was difficult for them to implement it for a number of reasons.

The research method was the metadata analysis to reveal the features and properties of the most appropriate ways to implement the experiment and the statistics data analysis and its interpretation; the pedagogy methods and approaches analysis. To generalize, classify and interpret the results observed the descriptive method was used. In addition, there were used elements of quantitative methods of analysis and also scientific methods of observation, generalization and comparison. It should be noted that in the course of the research process the linguistic data and methodology data were involved together with the general linguistic, pedagogy, and cultural data. As a result, the most common and effective methods were singled out and their choice explained.

The results showed that in case of Activity Approach to Teaching English the educational process was complicated not only by the linguistic and cultural dissonance but also by the modern environment complexities. Whereas preparation for classes appeared to be more time and energy consuming, as students were involved in projects drafting, planning and assessment criteria development. Consequently, the study revealed the necessity to continue the research into the methods of the activity approach implementation according to modern reality challenges. The experiment identified a contradiction between the motivation to perform the task and the total lack of time to accomplish it as students may have other duties: jobs, second education, or they live in the suburbs and spend much time on commuting.