Exercise as an item of teaching

The famous Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotskyin his book ‘Thinking and Speech’ (1934) gives a definition of an item as ‘such a product of analysis, which, in contrast to its elements, possesses all major features characteristic of the whole and which is a further indivisible part of this whole’.

I.L. Bimconsiders an exercise to be an item of teaching a foreign language. She maintains that an exercise is related not only to training but also to any form of interaction between the teacher and pupils based on the teaching material. In case of self-dependent work, it is a form of interaction between a pupil and a pupil. An exercise as a form of interaction has the following structure: 1) setting a task; 2) prompting the ways of task fulfilment with or without reference points and its fulfilment (modus operandi); 3) control or self-control. Such understanding of an exercise allows I.L. Bim to call it the basic teaching item in foreign language teaching.

However, this point of view is not unanimous. Sometimes methodologists and TEFLpractitioners understand the item of teaching as a grammatical structure (A.P. Starkov), a speech pattern(A.D. Arakin) or a language model(I.M. Berman). A grammatical structure is a scheme expressing the relationships between the components of a speech unit (a sentence, or a phrase) not less than a syntagm. A speech pattern is the typical unit of speech, by analogy with which other speech units of the same structure can be produced. A speech pattern is the speech realisation of a language model in a definite communicative situation. Thus, a speech pattern is a definite variant, while a language model (S + P + O + AM) is an invariant. The language model becomes a speech pattern only in a definite communicative situation or context. The speech pattern is always logically and prosodically shaped and defined. That’s why the speech pattern differs from the language model in:

1) situationally specific and contextually defined lexical meaning;

2) logical stress (which is defined by a communicative task and content of the utterance), rhythm and intonation contour (defined by the type of a sentence – a statement, question, etc.);

3) the definite morphological shaping of the sentence parts in accordance with the language norms.

Prof. Minyar-Beloruchevstresses in this connection, ‘All the attempts to relate structural models or speech patterns to the items of teaching are theoretically incorrect. That is so because it is the transfer of the items of one system (the system of language) into the other system (the system of teaching). The exercise is the item of teaching a foreign language, for it is an indivisible unit of the process of teaching’. This unit is understood as specifically organised and purposefully interconnected learning operations of students, which are limited in the language material.