DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS BY CREATING AUTHENTIC-PROBLEMATIC SITUATIONS WHEN LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Olga Khalupo
Doctor of Philological Sciences, South Ural State Agrarian University, Russian Federation, olgakhalupo@list.ru

Abstract

For many years teaching a foreign language in Russian higher educational institutions has been aimed at developing communicative competence. Teachers solve the problem of developing skills and abilities in this type of activity by verbal and non-verbal means and various didactic techniques. Graduates should know the vocabulary of general and terminological fields, be able to conduct dialogues in a professional sphere, translate specialized texts from a foreign language and into a foreign language. Such a comprehensive list of knowledge and skills implies a good knowledge of a foreign language at the initial stage of study, that is, students should enter a university with good knowledge of a foreign language. But as practice shows, those students who were going to enter non-linguistic universities did not pay enough attention to this discipline. Thus, foreign language teachers face a difficult task in accomplishing their mission: they have to manage to develop certain competencies when teaching the students with poor level of language knowledge, to follow the curriculum and implement the content of the discipline. Therefore new approaches are being developed, new methodologies are being tested, a selection of methods is proposed for teaching correct and appropriate interaction of the students. In our opinion, the main components of any interaction are: the subject of communication (the subject of discussion); motivation (a person’s interest in communicating); means and methods of communication (those tools by means of which communication is carried out); the product of communication (the final point created as a result of communication). Thus, it is necessary to create such educational environment and such conditions of interaction for the students, in which they will actualize the previous communicative knowledge and skills, apply new ones, transfer them to new situations. And in order to organize such learning environment and such interaction conditions, it is necessary to find, create and implement corresponding authentic-problematic situations that can occur between people with different social statuses, between partners with different mentality and culture, between people from different professional spheres and even between representatives of different generations.

Keywords: Foreign language, teaching methods, learning environment, communication skills, authentic-problem situation.