In recent years, the priorities of education have changed significantly. At the forefront, modernity sets the goals for the development of the personality of the student. Therefore, the instructor himself must freely and flexibly operate with information, be able to easily show the students the level of their own knowledge and teach them how to improve them. A modern teacher should keep pace with the times, introducing new technologies.
The focus on active learning has become one of the most important components of the education strategy in higher education. The use of active teaching methods in foreign language lessons is a means of improving the quality of teaching a foreign language in order to develop the personality of students who are able and willing to participate in intercultural communication in the language of study and independently improve themselves in foreign speech activity. To effectively achieve key professional tasks, the teacher needs to build training on understanding the essence of academic work as a process of interaction between the teacher and students, which includes humanistic relationships, the desire for participation, empathy, acceptance of each other.
Active methods of teaching are methods that induce students to actively think and practice in the process of mastering educational material. They contribute to the formation of positive educational motivation, develop the creative abilities of students, actively involve them in the educational process, reveal the personality-individual abilities of students, develop non-standard thinking, increase cognitive activity, allow more effective acquisition of a large volume of material, develop the communicative qualities of the individual, the ability to work in a team, conduct joint project and research activities, defend their position and listen to strangers to be responsible for themselves and the team.
There are two groups of teaching methods: traditional and active. They differ from each other, primarily in their task.
Traditional – aimed at the transfer of a certain amount of knowledge, the formation of practical skills and are reproductive.
Active methods of teaching are aimed at developing students’ independent thinking and ability to solve non-standard problems.
The goal of learning is not just knowledge, skills, and skills, but the ability to think, reflect, and comprehend one’s actions. Knowledge is not acquired “in reserve”, it is taught not to the culture of the executive action, but to the culture of thought-creative activity, since the tasks, circumstances and situations of activity can change. It is known that one of the general laws of the process of mastering knowledge is the dependence of the effectiveness of the process of assimilation on the learner’s own intellectual activity. Active methods of training provide more activity for the learner than traditional methods, as it has been experimentally established that up to 10 % of what he hears, up to 50 % of what he sees and up to 90 % of what he does, is remembered in a person’s memory.
Activity – the own dynamics of living beings as a source of transformation or maintenance of vital links with the world around them.
Personality activity is a person’s ability to produce socially significant transformations in the world on the basis of appropriating the riches of material and spiritual culture.
The concept of “active” and “interactive” teaching methods are used as synonyms and characterize learning immersed in the process of communication of people. Methods of active learning – a set of ways to organize and manage educational and cognitive activities, a feature of which is its forced nature, experts say. Active teaching methods are built on the conscious creation of a tense, often conflict situation, which forces students to make decisions to achieve a given goal, in the conditions of incompleteness of the information they provide, the limited material and time resources, and in some cases – against opposition from the leadership of the game or other sites. In such conditions, the development of decisions is accompanied by emotions, which in turn ensures the mobilization of intellectual reserves, stimulates cognitive activity, allows for a long time to keep attention.
Interest in active teaching methods is caused by the acute need to improve the modern didactic system and do this with the least risk, that is, at the expense of the teacher’s skill, not overloading the students. Active methods of teaching in the process of pedagogical communication introduce non-traditional relations between the teacher and students in the classroom. New philosophy and values of semantic education.
Mastering the technology of active teaching methods gives the teacher the tools that can really change the situation in the classroom. Reduction of energy costs of the teacher and students, creating a comfortable creative environment, a favorable psychological atmosphere – these and other positive effects determine the active learning and application of this educational technology by teachers. Pedagogical, psychological and sociological aspects aimed at active, interested participation of all students in the educational process, providing comfort in the employment of each student, and shaping the students’ focus on achieving results were used as the basis for the development of goals, principles, content and active teaching methods.
The technology of active teaching methods effectively solves the tasks assigned to education, including in the classroom for a foreign language.
First, it involves intensive group interaction. Working in a team, defending one’s position and tolerant attitude towards someone else’s opinion, taking responsibility for oneself and the team form the personality qualities, moral attitudes and values of students that meet the modern needs of society.
Secondly, the technology of active methods is able to provide a high degree of motivation for students to learn a foreign language, their involvement in the process of active communication in a foreign language.
One of the main advantages of active teaching methods is that they help to create a positive emotional mood, an atmosphere of psychological comfort, orientation to the success of each student, which significantly increases the effectiveness of the session.
The structure of the lesson using the technology of active teaching methods corresponds to the structure of the activity using the system-activity approach, which is the basis for the standards of the new generation. It includes the following main stages: initiation (greeting, acquaintance); entry or immersion in the topic (definition of the objectives of the activity, expectations and fears of students); work on the topic (interactive lecture, working out the content of the topic in groups); relaxation, emotional relaxation; reflection, summing up.
It is very important for the educator to work through all the steps, create a complete picture of the occupation and thereby ensure the systemic and integrity of the educational process.
The use of technology of active teaching methods in class provides a high level of interest of students, their cognitive and creative activity, allows creating a situation of success for each student. This, in turn, helps to make the learning process rich, quality, effective and psychologically comfortable not only for students, but also for educators.
His contribution to the development of active teaching methods was made by A.M. Matyushkin, Т.V. Kudryavtsev, M.I. Makhmutov, I.Y. Lerner, M.M. Levi. It should be noted that, A.M. Matyushkin in his works not only substantiated the need to use active methods in all types of student teaching, but also introduced the concept of dialogical problematic learning as the most fully conveying the essence of the processes of joint activity of teachers and students, as well as their mutual activity within the framework of the “subject – subjective” relationship [1, p.129]. At the same time, the basis of the initial provisions of the theory of active teaching methods is the concept of “subject content of activities”, developed by Academician A.N. Leontyev, it is with this knowledge is defined as an activity aimed at the development of the objective world. Therefore, when entering into contact with the objects of the external world, a person learns them and is enriched by practical experience both in the cognition of the world (learning and self-learning) and in influencing it [2, p.178].
Formation of active learning of students is one of the means of development of cognitive activity. The application of problematic and developmental training in practice led to the emergence of methods called “active”.
In the process of teaching, the teacher can choose as one active method, and use a combination of several. But success depends on the system and the correlation of the chosen methods and tasks.
Consider the most common methods of active learning: presentations, case studies, problem situations, didactic games and others.
For each stage of the session, active methods should be used to effectively solve specific problems. Most methods are universal and can be used not only in foreign language classes, but also in classes in other academic disciplines.
A special place among active teaching methods is the method of projects – this is a comprehensive teaching method that allows individualizing the learning process, enabling the student to show independence in planning, organizing and monitoring his activities.
The project method allows students to show their independence in choosing a topic, sources of information, the way they are presented and presented. The project methodology allows individual work on a topic that is of greatest interest to each student of the project, which undoubtedly entails an increased motivated activity of the student. He himself chooses the object of research, he decides for himself: to confine himself to a textbook on a foreign language (simply by performing the next exercise), or read other textbooks provided by the program. However, often students turn to additional sources of information, analyze, compare, leaving the most important and entertaining.
At different stages of the lesson, methods of problem-based learning should be used. Problem training is a system of teaching methods, in which students gain knowledge not by memorizing and remembering them in a finished form, but as a result of thinking work to solve problems and problem problems built on the content of the material being studied.
A problematic situation is a cognitive difficulty, for the overcoming of which students must acquire new knowledge or make intellectual efforts. Problem situations can be objective (the situation is set by the teacher) and subjective (the psychological state of intellectual difficulty in solving the problem posed).
It is also possible to distinguish four interrelated functions of the problem situation: a) stimulating; b) teaching; c) organizing; d) controlling. The problem situation stimulates speech activity, increases its volume and variety of forms of utterance, and also promotes the strength of the formed speech skills and abilities.
The problem situation, realized and accepted by the learner for the solution, grows into a problem. The problem with specifying the parameters and conditions of the solution is a problematic problem. A problematic task is a learning problem with given conditions and, by virtue of this, the resulting limited search field available for the solution to the students. The totality of such purposefully designed tasks is designed to provide the basic functions of problem training: creative mastering of educational material and mastering the experience of creative activity.
Research method. For the organization of research activities in the lesson, it is necessary to correctly select assignments for the development of skills in scientific research and search activity, taking into account the type of the lesson and its place in the curriculum. Innovative activity takes place in various forms and manifestations: problem lessons and mini-projects, individual creative compositions and reasoning, search work, intellectual games, competitions of scientific projects. Obviously, research activity is a complex process that has a beneficial effect on the formation of all types of speech activity, while students need at least a minimum of linguistic knowledge.
One of the options for interactive learning is learning in cooperation. Training in cooperation (cooperative learning), training in small groups. The main idea of this method is to create conditions for active joint learning activities of students in different learning situations.
Students are different: some quickly grasp all the explanations, easily master lexical material, communicative skills; others need not only much more time to think about the material, but also additional examples, explanations. Such students, as a rule, hesitate to ask questions at all, or simply do not realize that they do not really understand, can not formulate the question correctly. If we combine students into small groups (3-4 people each) and give them one common task, stipulating the role of each group in the performance of this task, a situation arises in which everyone answers not only for the result of their work but, what is especially important, for the result of the whole group. Therefore, weak students try to find out from the strong all incomprehensible questions to them, and strong students are interested in ensuring that all members of the group, especially the weak student, thoroughly understand the material. Thus, joint efforts eliminate gaps. This is the general idea of learning in cooperation. Practice shows that together learning is not only easier and more interesting, but also much more effective.
One of the most successful and widely used methods of teaching a teacher is discussion as a method of group interaction. This is a special form of collective cooperation, which causes active intense mental activity. With the help of the discussion, the teacher skillfully includes students in important for them, diverse life situations that cause them the desire to talk and communicate and gives the opportunity to express their point of view, their understanding of the issue under discussion. Forms of participation of the teacher in the discussion of students can be very diverse, but in no case by imposing one’s opinion. It is best to do this by subtly calculated management of the discussion, through the formulation of problematic issues that require productive thinking, creative search for truth. This is possible when the teacher expresses his point of view only in the order of extracting the conclusions of their statements of students and the reasoned refutation of erroneous judgments. His position may coincide with the views of students, because they appeared as a result of leading questions of the teacher. It is by these methods that one can not simply direct the informative, intellectual-cognitive side of the discussion of theoretical questions, but also construct joint productive activity, thereby influencing the personal position of students, transforming their educational activity, thereby influencing the personal position of students, transforming their educational activities into educational and upbringing [3, p. 3].
Case-method: the analysis of concrete situations echoes the requirement of a new educational standard, including the ability to apply the acquired knowledge and skills to solve various typical life situations, as well as the problems associated with the person’s performance of typical social roles (family member, employee, owner, consumer and etc.). Such skills can be developed using the case method. This is a method of training, known as the case study (Case study) – a method for analyzing situations. The essence of it is that students are offered to comprehend the real life situation, the description of which simultaneously reflects not only a practical problem, but also updates a certain set of knowledge that must be learned when solving this problem. However, the problem itself does not have unique solutions.
Verified and inalienable in the educational process are gaming technologies: business game, role-playing game, simulation games.
The game is a powerful stimulus for mastering a foreign language and an effective reception in the arsenal of a foreign language teacher. Particular attention deserves, the method of “business game”, which originally appeared, strangely enough not in the education system, but in the practical sphere of government. Now business games are used in research work, in the process of project development, in collective decision-making. In the university business game is used most often for management training. The method of the business game is to model the situation of the activity that the students are to teach, in order to train future specialists in the models, and not on real objects, to perform the corresponding professional functions [1, p.133].
For practical testing of the studied material, it is possible to successfully apply trainings, when in the process of modeling specially designed situations, students have the opportunity to develop and consolidate the necessary knowledge and skills, change their attitude to their own experience and applied in the work.
The concept of training has a common collective significance. In training, various methods and techniques of active learning are commonly used: business, role and imitation games, case studies and group discussions.
Using the technology of active teaching methods allows you to make lessons that are modern, meet the needs of students and increase the level of motivation of students and their activity in foreign language lessons.
All active and interactive teaching methods are designed to solve the main task – to teach the learner to learn. That is, the truth should not be presented “on a silver platter”. It is much more important to develop critical thinking based on the analysis of the situation, independent search for information, building a logical chain and taking a weighted and reasoned decision.
In conclusion, we would like to express gratitude to our scientific advisor – the Head of Foreign Languages Department, c.p.s., associate professor V.A. Burmistrova.