Abstract:

When studying a foreign language, a great role is given to independent homework. Traditional educational tools (textbooks and workbooks) were extremely limited in the way they represented foreign speech. The limited means of training dictates the limited types of speech activities that can be organized as independent work. The types of speech activity are divided into productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (reading and listening). It is possible to organize all kinds of speech activities during the classroom sessions, while when working independently it is almost impossible to acquire the skills of oral speech, listening and dictation writing by means of traditional methods. The introduction of information technologies into the educational process allows expanding the range of training tools by creating educational content in multimedia format. The educational content is filled with illustrations in the form of pictures and photos, video clips and audio inserts. The modern formats of electronic documents allow combining all types of information presentation. Communication technologies make it possible to save, move and deliver learning documents created for students to be used in their independent work. The change in the means of training dictates the need to introduce the innovative teaching methods aimed at organizing such types of speech activity as listening and dictation.

While traditional methods of teaching are preferable for studying spelling and grammar both in the classroom and in the independent work, the created educational materials, rich in multimedia content, allow organizing new types of works on acquisition of phonetic and lexical skills. In the course of this study, multimedia English lessons for the students of the 5th grade in iSpring Suite were created. The e-course constructor iSpring Suite works in an intuitive interface similar to PowerPoint, has multitasking functionality and supports multimedia content format. The lessons created in this program allow students to be trained on all kinds of gadgets placed on any platform. The created educational materials allow organizing "computer-didactic iterations", which has been expressed in multiple presentations of lexical units by the placement of educational content in different formats: text, audio and video. The tasks using the created content have been developed. The new kinds of tasks that couldn't be organized before include the following ones: read the word and listen to the word; listen to the text and answer the questions; home dictation; watch the video and retell its content; take a test.

A pedagogical experiment has been carried out, which confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology based on a combination of traditional teaching methods with the use of innovative means and technologies. The main features of the proposed method are: the placement of educational content in a multimedia format, the ability to refer to the training material repeatedly, the ability to do homework in audio and video format, the ability to diversify the types of speech activities, to increase the intensity and regularity of classes and to organize the control measures through the use of test technologies.

Keywords:

Information and communication technologies, studying foreign languages, new training tools, teaching methods, educational content, listening skills.