WEB-ресурс научно-практических конференций

WARMING-UP AS AN ESSENTIAL STAGE OF AN ENGLISH LESSON

Candidate of pedagogical sciences Melnichenko G.V.

Within the frameworks of personality directed education general attention is invariably focused upon the way of organizing it due to the needs, abilities and peculiarities of students. Still it most obviously concerns the stage of dealing with educational material rather than the preparatory, leading-in one, the latter is always implied but treated quite formally, in the form of “Who’s-on-duty-today?” or “What-is-the-weather-like-today?” – conversation . As a matter of fact, the initial part of the lesson remains beyond the scope of teachers’ concerns though the importance of this stage is undisputable. It substantiates the actuality of the problem.

Classical outline of an English lesson at any educational institution includes so-called “warming-up” stage – the initial content stage of a training process focused upon preparation for active work. Its purposes range within the following ones: (a) to make participants of educational process kindly disposed and friendly; (b) to make them enliven; (c) to make them ready for an event or practicing; (d) to make them ardent and enthusiastic; (e) to involve into the language community atmosphere; (f) to neutralize negative or inappropriate psychological state; (g) to build up close interpersonal relations; (h) to find out more information about each other, i.e. their interests and background, etc.

Traditionally warming-up implies phonetic, vocabulary and speech activities or their mixture [1 , p .243 ]. Each of these resorts to different forms, contents and time due to learners’ level and age, aspect of teaching and peculiarities of participants of educational process. To demonstrate that let us observe different ways to warm up phoneme [?]:

1. Dialogue between the teacher and students, frontal form of work:

T: Among the phonemes choose monophthongs : [ ei ], [ i ], [?], [u:], [ a? ].

S:   [ i ], [?].

T: Are both of them open?

S: Only [?] is open.

T: It is long, isn’t it?

S: It is neither long nor short.

T: It is pronounced in the same way both in “mad” and “mat”, isn’t it?

S:   No, because of the following voiced consonant [d] this phoneme sounds longer in the first word.

T: What’s the most common mistake in articulation of this phoneme?

S:   Replacement by Russian [ э ], and so on.

2. Dialogue between the teacher and students, frontal work:

T: Name the words containing phoneme [?] due to their description:

- That’s informal for “father” (dad);

- It is a hand tool used to exert an impulsive force by striking (hammer);

- It is the meat of the thigh of a hog (ham), and so on.

3. Reading the rhyme, frontal / individual / front work:

Fat Pat has a fat cat ./ That fat cat has a flat hat, /

and sat on the mat with a fat rat.

From methodological point of all three are purposeful but the last two have only one aim – to revise the item on the topic (phoneme [?]), while the first task may create a real dialogue between the participants of educational process. So, the first demand for this stage – is to build up a united team of cooperative colleagues.

For vocabulary-oriented warming-up stage teachers can use such activities as “The word I like/ hate most” (presenting associations and the feelings this word arouses); “ Try to guess my word” (by its description of performing by gestures) and so on.

The most effective from psychological and educational point of view is a speech warming-up, adding communicative trend to educational process. It can be of two types: (a) topic-centered and (b) miscellaneous.   The latter is more useful as it allows students to boost up different vocabulary, see the most “dangerous” or “weak” topics, find out students’ interests and preferences. Below are some of the questions used at this stage with students-future teachers of English (3 ^rd and 4 ^th years):

-    Do you like to reread books?

-    Have you ever deceived anybody?

-    What kind of person can attract your attention?

-    When did you last lose your temper?

-    Do you have any indisputable, absolute life principles?

-    What do you value most – your past, present or future?

-    Can you describe the most confusing moment in your life?

It is better to suggest students drawing out card with the questions printed on the table-faced side to add the activity some sense of curiosity and unexpectedness. Experience shows that vocabulary acquired at this stage is imprinted in memory best.

Apart from obvious advantages there might appear some reefs when beginning a lesson in such a way: (a) sometimes it may grow time-consuming developed into discussion and devouring all other stages of the lesson; (b) make “silent” learners feel uncomfortable or even “outsiders”;    (c) lack of words can lead to shallow, meaningless, formal answers or refusing to answer at all.

Except for the described speech activity the warming-up stage can contain short listening activities, teacher’s describing what s\he saw on her\his way to school, confirming or refuting proverbs and simple statements, do-it-yourself stories on suggested words, writing activity ”What is on my mind now?”, describing a person in the photo, etc.

No matter if it is speech-oriented or vocabulary-focused, the warming-up stage must vary to some degree throughout educational process to perform its main functions – to tune students to real motivated communication.  

Literature :

1. Методика навчання іноземних мов у середніх навчальних закладах: Підручник / Ред. С. Ю,Ніколаєва .   – К.: Ленвіт , 1999. – 320 с.