Formation of mental actions in foreign language teaching.

Plan:

1. Theory of stage by stage.

2. Formation of mental actions in foreign language teaching.

Imagine yourself in the following situation: you sign up for a psychology experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small room. You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually associates of the experimenter, and their behaviour has been carefully scripted. You're the only real subject.

The experimenter arrives and tells you that the study in which you areabout to participate concerns people's visual judgments. She places two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical line. The card is on the right displays three lines of different length.

The experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards. The other " subjects" unanimously choose the wrong line. It is clear to you that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer.

What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you trust your own eyes?

In 1951, the social psychologist Asch used this experiment to exam­ine how the pressure from other people could affect one's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation agree with the majority.

Some of the subjects indicated after the experiment that they assumed the rest of the people were correct and that their own percep­tions were wrong. Others knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest of the group. Some even insisted they saw tri line lengths as the majority did.

Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. Pressure from other people can make you see al most anything.

The skeleton of any language consists of language structures. The ability to manipulate grammatical structures is not sufficient for expressing meaning unless words are used. It is more important to choose words carefully than choosing structures. In life communication it is possible that where vocabulary is used correctly it can cancel out structural inaccuracy.(e.g. I have seen him yesterday. This sentence is grammatically wrong but the sense is quite understandable.)Thus we must have something to say, we must have meanings we wish to express and we need to have a store of words that we can select from. We should possess with the sufficiently large scale of vocabulary to express the complexity of feelings.

According to contemporary requirements, to the communicative approach in education methodologists have increasingly been turning their attention to teaching vocabulary.

Control questions:

1. What’s Theory of stage by stage?

2. What’s formation of mental actions in foreign language teaching?

Recommended literature:

1. Психология обучения неродному языку. И.А.Зимняя, М., 2000

2. Психология обучения иностранным языкам в школе. И.А.Зимняя, М., 1991

3. Психология развития. Грейс Крайг, Санкт-Петербург, 2000