Abstract:

Today's life requires students' communication skills in different professional situations. Students should also be able to follow the social and cultural rules appropriate to each communication circumstance. Therefore, the research is devoted to considering the ways of teaching speaking during the process of leading students from pure memorizing to meaningful communication. The research is based on the communication and collaboration methods. It is the communication method which involves both the students and the teacher into the teaching process on the base of collaboration between equal partners. The method guarantees that learners will acquire the target language when they are motivated and involved actively in the learning process. The analysis of methodical literature, English teachers’ experience, and the results of this study show that using the proper teaching and learning techniques enables language learners’ second language acquisition. The main teaching technique is “lace making” (Yezhova N.N.) one. This technique involves the learners into extending original phrases consisting of two or three words. As a result the phrase should change into a very long sentence. The same technique enables making texts as well. According to this study, language learners acquire target language when they interact with each other. As our observations indicate, going over from pure memorizing to meaningful communication is possible due to various classroom activities that meet learners’ needs, and that are based on authentic English language in context. The task of the teacher is to provide language learners with real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language based on the just learned educational material. This can be attained by students’ collaborating in groups of two or three people to achieve a goal or to complete a task. The educational material to be learned by heart by students should be activated with the help of controversial sentences. To measure students’ oral speech skills rate we used such kinds of communicative output activities as role plays and discussions. The study found out that the most used classroom activity was discussion as its aim was to encourage students asking questions, paraphrase ideas, express support, check for clarification, and so on. Role play activities were used the least.

The study recommends that student:
1) should be constantly encouraged and reminded to use the just learned educational material for practicing it in authentic English language;
2) they shouldn’t be interrupted for their mistakes to be corrected during their speech;
3) teachers should integrate various activities in a lesson to meet learners’ needs.

Further researches on teaching speaking will consider reading as one of four speech activities that are used in a foreign language teaching – learning process.

Keywords:

Teaching speaking, pure memorizing, meaningful communication, speaking skills, classroom activities, motivation, collaboration, authentic English language.