Research into teaching young learners the English dialogic speech

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Research into teaching young learners the English dialogic speech

Bodnar S.V.

Annotatіon

The article deals with the problem of teaching Ukrainian young learners the English dialogic speech. When conducting the pedagogical research, the following methods were used, namely: the comparison and system analysis of psychological, pedagogical, methodological sources, education process monitoring, pilot training with using the developed strategies for teaching the English dialogical speech to preschool children, work with the author's course for pre-schoolers “English in the Family”, describing the experimental phases. The one-year long pedagogical experiment was run at four Ukrainian public kindergartens in Odesa and Nikolaev.

The strategies for teaching preschool children the English dialogic speech were determined. The experimental test results provided the strong positive proof of the acquired skills of the English speech.

Key words: preschool education, Language teaching methodology, English dialogic speech, teaching strategies.

Анотація

Боднар С. В. Навчання дітей дошкільного віку англійського діалогічного мовлення

У статті розглядається проблема навчання українських дошкільнят англійського діалогічного мовлення. Під час проведення педагогічного дослідження використовувалися такі методи: порівняння і системний аналіз психологічних, педагогічних, методичних джерел, моніторинг освітнього процесу, пілотне навчання з використанням розроблених стратегій із навчання англійського діалогічного мовлення дошкільників, робота з авторським курсом для дошкільнят “Англійська мова в сім'ї”, опис етапів експерименту. Педагогічний експеримент проводився протягом року в чотирьох українських дитячих садках м. Одеси і Миколаєва. Під час проведення експерименту визначено стратегії з навчання дошкільнят англійського діалогічного мовлення. Отримані результати експерименту виявилися переконливим підтвердженням набутих дошкільнятами навичок англійського діалогічного мовлення.

Ключові слова: дошкільна освіта, методика викладання англійської мови, англійська діалогічна мова, стратегії навчання.

Аннотация

Боднар С. В. Обучение детей дошкольного возраста английской диалогической речи

В статье рассматривается проблема обучения украинских дошкольников английской диалогической речи. При проведении педагогического исследования использовались следующие методы: сравнение и системный анализ психологических, педагогических, методических источников, мониторинг образовательного процесса, пилотное обучение с использованием разработанных стратегий по обучению английской диалогической речи дошкольников, работа с авторским курсом для дошкольников “Английский язык в семье”, описание этапов эксперимента. Педагогический эксперимент проводился в течение года в четырех украинских детских садах г. Одессы и Николаева. В ходе проведения эксперимента были определены стратегии по обучению дошкольников английской диалогической речи. Полученные результаты эксперимента явились убедительным подтверждением приобретенных дошкольниками навыков английской диалогической речи.

Ключевые слова: дошкольное образование, методика преподавания английского языка, английская диалогическая речь, стратегии обучения.

Modern integration processes, the entry of Ukraine into the European educational space, the international exchange of information in various fields of knowledge have a significant impact on the enhancement of the status of a foreign language as an important means of communication that requires reforming the language education at all levels. The change of the period of learning foreign languages from a teenager age to a junior or even preschool age as a sensitive time for mastering a foreign-language communication became an important step of introducing changes into the system of language training at the present time [5]. Preschool education, that involves a child into learning foreign languages, lays the foundation for the implementation of the social order of the society in the field of language education and gives a child some additional opportunities for his comprehensive development.

Psychological and psycholinguistic bases of such training were actively developed by psychologists Sh. Amonashvili (1983), Ye. Negnevitskaya (1986), A. Shakhnarovich (1990), A. Leontiev (1999), G. Saffran (2001), J. Cassidy (2008) and others. In their works, they showed that the methods of preschool teaching should take into account the characteristics of children's communication and involve their natural proclivity to learning languages. At this age children acquire knowledge through interaction with other people: child-to-child interaction, educator-to-child interaction, parents-to-child interaction. The children are naturally curious and enthusiastic to explore the world around them, they contact the world through emotions, cognize it, react vividly to surrounding changes, get acquainted with new activities. Language learning happens optimally when the words provided tie to an activity in which the child is engaged. The preschool children's activities are related to the perception, understanding and reproduction the content of stories, fairy tales, poems in various kinds of games and theatrical performances. According to the words of A. Bogush, they are characterized by a productive and aesthetic character, as they are accompanied by figurative speech and the use of various genres of artistic words [2014, p. 45].

Analysing the existing researches connected with teaching young learners a foreign language we have found out that the core of all methods used in the practice of teaching preschool children a foreign language is connected with an oral speech. The researchers of the XXth century offered the following methods of teaching young learners a foreign language: A. Zavialova (1983) suggested the use of individualized characters to create game situations. Z. Futerman (1984) emphasized the mandatory use of the native language while studying a foreign one as a means of semantisation that helps to acquire a foreign language material. Ye. Negnevitskaya (1986) recommended that the children should be taught on the basis of psycholinguistic regularities of language mastering which are characteristic of the childhood period and it should be conducted in a collective game. T. Polonskaya (1993) introduced fabula (narrative) texts into the teaching process. S. Bodnar (1996) accentuated the use of interconnected verbal and nonverbal means of communication in the teaching process.

Many contemporary researchers of the XXIst century supported these ideas and added their own methods of teaching children a foreign language by means of: songs and rhymes (K. Nagy, 2018); music activities (L. Lee, Sh. Lin, 2015); didactic games (T. Chuvakova, A. Abramovich, 2013), composing own fairy tales (G. Tkachuk, 2001); personally-oriented (S. Sokolovska, 2005) and differentiated and individualized (O. Boyko, 2012; O. Humankova, 2014) approaches; fingers plays (A. Spiridonova, 2010), dramatized games (M. Puylova, Yu. Ovsyannikova, 2017), creative developing activities (I. Krolevetska, 2015), “digital storytelling” (A. Sklandancuk, 2015), videogames (C. Pitarch, 2017), multimedia technology (O. Bihych, A. Mokina, 2013), technology “edutainment” (education+ entertainment) (O. Dyakonova, 2013; M. Koroleva, 2017), method TSIT (theory of solving invention tasks) (Ya. Nechaieva, 2017; N. Zatsepina, 2017). There are researches examining the content and language integrated learning for preschoolers: English, science, maths and music (H. Doron, 2016; G. Soficu, 2016). teaching english speech language

However, one part of the above-mentioned methods involves learning only the individual words, fixed phrases, English-language songs, poems, tales, small texts by heart; the second part focuses on rote learning of definite roles during dramatization of fairy tales; the third group offers the situational approach to learning where young learners are immersed in the foreign language environment by playing different games in English. We keep to the opinion of the third group of researchers considering the process of immersion into the foreign language environment the most effective one. But at the same time our research is aimed at creating the total immersion in the foreign language environment applying such methods of teaching a foreign language that are similar to the methods of teaching the mother tongue to the preschool children. It means the development of the children's speech in the activities that are typical for them: physiological, physical, social, gaming, cognitive. The driving force of this idea is the need for communication which arises in the process of the above mentioned activities. In this regard, as A. Bogush states [1], the child faces the need to resolve the following contradictions: the desire to reproduce the physiological actions and the lack of vocabulary to express it; the desire to show physical activity and the lack of language means to express it; the desire to communicate with other people and the lack of language means to express it; the desire to show game activity and the lack of language means to express it. To resolve these contradictions, the child is in demand to improve his speech activity based on the imitation of the adults' speech.

Moreover, the process of learning should be based on such a great amount of listening, repetitions and reproductions of adults' speech, which transfer into a new quality of a child's own speech behavior. Thus, the quality of a preschooler's speech depends on the factor of repetitions of speech samples which he heard. Repetition for this age children is based on their most developed ability to imitate what they heard. It is the main component of their activity. At the same time, they copy not only the content, but also the adults' intonation, tempo, and timbre. At first, imitation can be meaningless, and only the number of imitations in certain semantic situations, the so-called natural education of children in the natural speech environment, can lead to a qualitative improvement of meaningful speech.

One more focus of our research is on the involvement of all children of the group into the learning activity. Basing on the review of the above-mentioned literature concerning teaching English to very young learners as a second/ foreign language, it was found out that the existing teaching methods don't pay attention to the balance of all children's participation in the learning activities. Very often one part of children acts more as observers and other part behaves as doers. Accordingly, the “observers” don't have an opportunity to systematic repetition of the entire linguistic material under study. But the psychologists [6] state if learners don't repeat the new words after the first acquaintance with them, the memory keeps these words only for 8 hours and then deletes them; after the second acquaintance with the same words, the memory keeps the new words a little longer for 72 hours [4, p. 507] but then without regular repetition it also deletes them. It means that in order to master a new linguistic material all children should be involved into a communicative activity to have an equal chance for repeating. Otherwise, sometime later the most part of the material can be forgotten and the children can use only a small amount of the language / speech information they received.

Thus, the aim of this research was to analyze the specifics of teaching young learners a foreign language, to define the methods of teaching the English dialogic speech to young learners in the “native” language environment, to evaluate the effect of usage of these methods on the education outcome achieved by children.

The research aim was obtained through these scientific methods: the comparison and system analysis of psychological, pedagogical, methodological sources, education process monitoring, pilot training, interviews with parents after the lessons, simple assessment testing and filling in documents. All the interviews with parents and conducted lessons were recorded, transcribed and analysed to see the progress of the learning.

The research was carried out in in four public kindergartens in cities: Odesa and Nikolaev. This was a pilot research, so it was decided to conduct it on a small scale, before carrying it out on a wider scale. The children aged 5-6 who had a written consent from their parents or legal guardians joined the tests. Overall, there were 60 young learners. The children who were chosen for participating in the experiment had a zero initial level of the English language knowledge at the start of learning period. The research was performed from 15 th of September to 20th of May (2016-2017) and had 108 hours of in-class activities. The classes were held 3 times a week, 35 minutes each. With the purpose of comparing the efficiency of different ways of teaching preschool children the English language all children were divided into two groups: experimental Group 1 (our teaching method) and control Group 2 (coursebook “My First

English Adventure: Starter” by Villarroel, Musiol (2005)) groups (EG and CG) with the number of children not more than 10 young learners in each group. The difference in their learning was in the content and character of learning activities, educational material and the balance of different kinds of work at the lesson.

The research was based on the elaborated course “English in the Family” designed for beginners. It comprises: small English educational texts with the participation of personified animals (Teddy-Bear, his parents and friends) and one plot line, designed in such a way that at the end of the topic those texts could easily be dramatized; stickers; plot pictures; songs, singing game rhymes, lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting-out rhymes, tongue twisters for the theme under study with audio and video records. The course provides the constant use of the lexical material under study in various semantic aspects in speech that is repeated from text to text. New lexical units from the first theme passed to the second one, from the second to the third, etc. They were used in different contexts and in various derivative forms (for example, to skate skates skater skating), thus ensuring their multiple repetition, that is considered obligatory for the complete mastering of lexical material, according to Yu. Martynova theory [3] because it does not allow words to be forgotten. The speech material increased from text to text, both in volume and in content. New words from the following topics were added to the general list of words and also began to be repeated from lessons to lesson. Such organization of the speech material helped the effective memorization of the linguistic units under study, their relatively complete mastering and the possibility of their use in various types of speech activity. The exercises were of receptive, reproductive and productive character with elements of dramatization and involvement of the thematic video materials, designed for teaching children speaking and listening. Following the course for pre-schoolers “English in the Family”, the young learners have got an opportunity to create a stable basic vocabulary to be able to use each language unit, which is under study, in its maximum possible linguistic and thematic environments; to develop communicative skills; to practice English intonation; to work at emotional expressiveness of speech.

Teaching preschool children the English dialogic speech we suggested using the following strategies: 1) Implementing drama activities that gradually gets more complicated from lesson to lesson; 2) Providing imitation approach in the process of teaching; 3) Using means of emotional expressiveness (different intonation models, a range of tempos, rhythm, logical pauses, stress, strength of voice and non-verbal means: mimic expressions, gestures, phonemes) in the process of studying to optimize the mastering of linguistic units at the level of perception, understanding and reproduction; 4) Ensuring interaction of verbal and non-verbal means of communication to provide the associative perception of the material and better saving it in the child's long-term memory; the non-verbal means act as complementary, intensifying and compensating linguistic means of communication in this case; 5) Providing situations with emotional dominant for dramatization to create a positive emotional atmosphere in the process of teaching;

6) Multiple repeating each language unit, which is under study, in its maximum possible linguistic and thematic environments using different English intonation models; 7) Training every role of a fairy tale for class dramatization with all learners taking into account the possibility of interchange of pupils at the performance; 8) Incorporating visual and auditory aids into class activity (for example, English educational cartoons as a means of presentation authentic English speech in general and English intonation models in particular).

The above-mentioned strategies are intertwined in the teaching process which embraces three experimental stages; each of them introduces a set of assignments characteristic of the particular stage.

The first experimental stage preparatory and linguistic had the purpose of preparing children for a speech activity, forming children's linguistic skills. At this stage, the children were acquainted with the new vocabulary by means of emotional and descriptive non-verbal and intonation means, drawings; they were instilled the skills of the correct English pronunciation; they were acquainted with the main English intonation models; they used multiple repetitions of lexical, grammatical and intonation communicative means in various combinations during game exercises. At the beginning of each lesson, it was supposed to create a positive mood for the children to perceive a new material (quiet music sounding as a background, conversations in the native language on the subject under study).

The second experimental stage was educational-reproductive. Its goal was to practice the lexical / grammatical material and intonation models under study; to intensify the interaction of verbal and non-verbal means of communication; to develop pre-speech skills (making up own sentences, mini-dialogues, using the correct vocabulary, grammar and intonation under study; perception of the speech of the fairy tale heroes in accordance with their role behaviour and reproduction of this speech by children). The second set of assignments (receptive-reproductive and receptive-productive) was introduced at this stage.

The third experimental stage was productive-dramatizing. Its aim was to develop the skills of the English interaction which was based on the speech and emotional situations of the topics under study, as well as the children's dramatic skills. At this stage, various types of games (“director's games, dramatizing games, simulations, staging), retelling in the forms of dialogues based on the texts for children from the author's textbook “English in the Family”, communicative exercises are offered. Their share in the experimental system was 40%. In these activities, lexical and grammatical communicative means lose the role of the main components from time to time, and the influence of intonation and non-verbal means extends, that contributes to the growth of their role from simple expressiveness to the fixation of a certain meaning. The third set of assignments (productive), where the pupils had to make up their own mini-dialogues on the basis of the given speech situations, to communicate with their interlocutors using correct intonation and accompanying non-verbal means, dramatize the scenes of fairy tales, is introduced at this stage, namely:

To measure the children's progress and to prove the validity of the offered teaching methods, the final assessment test was conducted. The criteria for checking up the developed English speech skills in preschool children were the following: 1) linguistic (ability to produce adequately lexical units under study, phrases and separate sentences on a certain topic and to find equivalents from their mother tongue); 2) meaningful (the ability to perceive and understand English speech by ear), 3) communicative (the ability to communicate with each other in accordance with thematic speech situations).

Ability to produce adequately the linguistic material under study was verified by means of translating the wordcombinations: a) from the English language to the mother tongue; b) from the mother tongue to English. According to this criterion, during the intermediate test (in the middle of the year), 43% of the children of EG showed the ability to produce adequately the linguistic material under study and 30% of the children of CG showed such an ability. During the final test (at the end of the school year), 73% of the children of the EG demonstrated the ability to produce adequately the linguistic material under study and 40% of the children of the CG did it.

The perception and understanding of the English language were tested with the help of receptive tasks. The teacher told the coherent text in English, which was built on the familiar material (the volume of the text is 10 sentences), the children listened. Text understanding was checked with the help of laconic children's answers "Yes" or "No" to the teacher's question. During the intermediate test the children of EG could perceive 40% of the text, the children of CG 20 %. During the final test the number of correct answers in the children of EG was 76 %, in the children of CG 40 %.

The ability to communicate with each other in accordance with thematic speech situations was tested by means of such tasks: 1) to answer the teacher's questions on the basis of the learned linguistic material, using not only the correct lexical and grammatical means, but also the appropriate English intonation; 2) to speak with the “hero of the fairy tale” (4-5 phrases for each child). The children's answers were fixed by means of recording and examined after the lesson.

During the intermediate test, 35 % of the EG children and 20% of the CG children demonstrated the ability to produce dialogic speech. At the end of the school year, 60 % of the EG children and 35 % of the CG children could make the dialogue, composing different phrases according to the situation of communication with the use of unidirectional combination of verbal and non-verbal means of communication, say their sentences with a correct intonation.

During the experiment, some regularities were set, among them we found the following: 1) intonation skills are developed faster and more successfully if they are worked out at the initial stage of education and in the emotional situations, taking into account the use of non-verbal means of communication; 2) there is a systematic repetition of the linguistic material in a diverse linguistic environment; 3) speech skills, developed in one situation, are easily transferred to the other similar situations; 4) auditory, visual, speech and motion analysers are taken into account in the process of dramatizing; 5) mastering of speech material is more successful if the educational situation is as close to reality as possible.

Conclusions

The obtained results provide the strong positive proof of the acquired skills of the English speech. The children of the experimental group demonstrated good listening skills, skills of independent producing linguistic units at the level of the word, phrase and utterance within the scope of the material under study. The children of the senior preschool age were able to solve simple communicative tasks, using non-verbal means of communication in their speech, such as gestures, phonemes, mimic expressions, pronounce the phrases with a correct intonation and rhythm, logical stress, varying intonation models depending on the character of the linguistic situation. In addition to mastering a foreign language, the children received knowledge about the English culture and traditions.

The perspectives of our future research are using computer-based learning technologies for further developing English dialogical skills in young learners.

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