IMPROVING SPEAKING AND WRITING SKILLS

Shadmanova N.I.

Department of Uzbek and Russian Languages, Karshi Engineering-Economic institute

IMPROVING SPEAKING AND WRITING SKILLS

Summary

In teaching Russian language as a second language at the university, especially, Non-philology University is demandable. We design our language courses according to the level and target needs of learners, in such case, communicative and writing skills of learners is more required in order to demonstrate their specialty in L2 in target environment. Furthermore, speaking courses allow learners to state or express their ideas freely but writing course promotes learners how to write essays, stories, or how to describe objects or pictures in written context. Moreover, speaking and writing courses fulfill each other in language classes.  This paper highlights some statements of scholars on the issues of advancing speaking and writing skills of learners. We stated some strategies which is important to use in Russian language classes. 

Key words: Russian language, speaking skills, writing skills, subject matter

Introduction

The productive skills of a foreign language include speaking and writing, two critical components of the complex process of communication. With regards to the speaking skill,  “speaking is a productive skill and it involves many components. Speaking is more than making the right sounds, choosing the right words or getting the constructions grammatically correct.” (Prieto 2007)

Although speaking is one of the most important skills to master, learners may not reach a high level of oral skills because some teachers may not use appropriate strategies that permit them to develop these skills correctly. It is important that teachers implement strategies that improve their students’ oral production, such as: role plays, performances, songs, play activities, and cooperative learning. Holden (1985) points out that “role plays and dramatizations are activities that students enjoy a lot not only because they like to dress in different ways, make faces and imagine that they are different people, but also because they can internalize and use language expressions. Teaching and guiding students to learn a second language is a hard job, consequently, teachers have to try to find other pedagogical tools in order to promote the engineering students’ learning process effectively.

  1. Strategy in Teaching languages

It is important that a teacher uses different strategies when teaching to improve the learning process in an interesting way that catches the students’ attention. Similarly, learning strategies can greatly improve learning outcomes for students entering the classroom with different learning styles and abilities. Stephen (2006) points out that “Strategy has the power to transform passive students into active learners equipped with the tools to promote strategic planning and independent reflection”.  Furthermore, Nunan (1991) states that “learning strategies are the mental processes which learners employ to learn and use the target language”.

However, Serradel (2005, p209) stated that “learning strategies refer to the techniques learners apply in order to understand, remember and learn contents, which it is the object of learning”. Besides, the use of adequate strategies helps to attain the maximum goals and success. Moreover, we use variety of strategy in order to improve communicative competences of learners in Russian language classes.

  1. Communicative competences

One of the major objectives in teaching dialogic communication in engineering sphere for the foreign students is to develop speaking skills of learners in engineering field. There are some peculiarities of this methods;

  • Elaboration of the concepts on the specifics of oral and written communication,
  • Enable learners actively participate in dialogue patterns,
  • Promote them pronounce in target language
  • promote them acquiring technical language in conversation
  • enhance their speaking skills in L2
  • guide them describe objects in engineering  

Engineering talk is a form of engineering interaction, which is one of the most common and referred to the dialogic speech forms, thus allowing for the skills training of verbal interaction with a partner. A form of engineering conversation and its thematic diversity allow developing the skill of the fluent associative conversation within certain thematic framework. Teaching the speaking in engineering in L2 allows developing the skills of the coherent oral and written communication, taking into account such important characteristics of speech as functions, forms, types, functional and semantic, functional and stylistic and compositional forms of speech.

Therefore, teaching the dialogic communication in engineering fields meets not only the objectives of the professional education, but also is relevant to the general concept of “communicative law” in teaching the foreign languages (Belchikov, 1988). The ‘communicative events’ (Munby, 1985) listed in the course description included reading articles, documents, periodicals, textbooks related to students’ fields of study, writing descriptions and reports, conversing in the target disciplines, and giving oral presentations on topics related to the profession. Moreover, there are main reasons for getting students to speak in the classroom. Firstly, speaking activities provide rehearsal opportunities-chances to practice real-life speaking in the safety of the classroom. Secondly, speaking tasks in which students try to use any or all of the languages they know provide feedback for both teacher and students. Everyone can see how well they are doing: both how successful they are and also what language problems they are experiencing. And finally, the more students have opportunities to activate the various elements of language they have stored in their brains, the more automatic their use of these elements become. As a result, students gradually become autonomous language users. This means that they will be able to use words and phrases fluently without very much conscious thought.

Good speaking activities can and should be extremely engaging for the students. If they are all participating fully- and if the teacher has set up the activity properly and can then give sympathetic and useful feedback- they will get tremendous satisfaction from it. Teaching of speaking depends on there being a classroom culture of speaking, and that classrooms need to become “talking classrooms”. In other words, students will be much more confident speakers (their speaking abilities will improve)if this kind of activation is regular feature of lessons (Jeremy Harmer. 2007: 126).

  1. Advancing Writing skills

When thinking about writing, it is helpful to make a distinction between writing-learning and writing-for-writing. In case of the former, writing is used as an aide-memoir or practice for tool to help students practice and work with language they have been studying. Writing activities like this are designed to give students reinforcement to students.  Writing –for –writing, on the other hand, is directed at developing the students’ skills as writers. In other words, the main purpose for activities of this type is that students should become better at writing, whatever kind of writing that might be. There are good ‘real good life” reasons for getting students to write such things as emails, letters, and reports. Whereas in writing –for-learning activities it is usually the language itself that is the main focus of attention, in writing –for-writing we look at the whole text. This will not include just appropriate language use, but also text construction, layout, style and effectiveness( Jeremy Harmer.2007: 112). Besides, in improving writing skills, a learner should have background knowledge, enough vocabulary knowledge to state or express in written context. Some scholars discuss that a learner should have 55% or more vocabulary words in order to write creatively. In writing and speaking courses, activity, particularly, role-play plays important role in performance of learners in speaking, enable them interact with each other, and acquisition of technical and semi-technical words and word-combinations.   

  1. Role-play

When students suddenly want to talk about something in a lesson and discussion occurs spontaneously, the results are often highly grafting.  When students are involved in a speaking activity such as a role-play or conversation, instant and intrusive correction is often not appropriate since it can interfere with flow of the activity and inhibit students just at the moment when they should be trying hardest to activate their language knowledge ( Jeremy Harmer.2007:12). We teach 25 students with a group, according to the rule of role-play, our students should be divided into 3 groups; A, B, C. Each group is given a topic to perform, make students speak in that topic, describe it in full. This activity engage students’ active performance as well as improve speaking skills of learners in target environment.    

Conclusion

There is also an interface between language and communication skills; in some areas language and skills cannot be separated. A spoken message comprises the words themselves and the way in which they are spoken; a face-to-face spoken message also contains body language, the impact of each of these components depends on the context (Dudley-Evans and John.1998:71). Furthermore, the command of foreign language implies the ability to respond fluently to various situations. Therefore, the main purpose of teaching Russian as a second language is to develop communicative competences as well as writing skills.  Such skills as the ability to compose a coherent text, the ability to design verbal statements based on the written ones, the ability to take advantage of non-verbal interaction are highly important in the skills development of communication in mining engineering for the students. These skills are developed throughout the entire teaching course of Russian as a second language. Activity, particularly, role-play plays crucial role in language teaching classes because it may foster a learner to speak and write.

References

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  3. Holden, S. (1985). Second Selection from Modern English Teacher. London: Longman.
  4. Jeremy Harmer. How to Teach English. – Longman, 2007.
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