1.2 Teacher's speech as basic form of teaching listening comprehension Teaching is a very complicated complex process. Its success depends on several factors. One of the most important factors is a teacher himself or herself.
There are three main activities that teachers have to manage simultaneously:
- managing the group;
- managing activities;
- managing the learning.
In many group teaching situations, the role of the teacher is that of facilitator of learning: leading discussions, asking open-ended questions, guiding process and task, and enabling active participation of learners and engagement with ideas. However, small groups function and behave in various ways and have different purposes. Teachers therefore need to be able to adopt a range of roles and skills to suit specific situations, often during the same teaching session. According to McCrorie the roles that may be adopted include that of:
- the instructor, who imparts information to students;
- the neutral chair;
- the consultant, from whom learners can ask questions;
- the devil's advocate;
- the commentator;
- the wanderer, such as in a larger workshop;
- the absent friend [8, p. 6].
Making the shift from teacher as expert to facilitator is sometimes seen as diminishing a teacher's power and authority, but this should not be the case. Facilitating learning is empowering for both the learner and the teacher and frees the teacher from many of the burdens that having to be an "expert" might entail. It would traditionally have been seen as a weakness for a teacher to say "I don't know, let's find out" or "I don't know, do any of you students know the answer?" and clearly clinical teachers need to know more about many topics than their students or trainees, but medical science is changing so rapidly that no one can know everything. Implementing an evidence-based approach to clinical learning and to medical practice involves finding out about the latest research. You can use these techniques and this approach to facilitate your own and your students'/trainees' learning [9, p. 16].
Practical learning a foreign language is possible only under condition when it is used as a mean of communication. A lesson has a lot of opportunities for using a language as a mean of communication between a teacher and a student. While choosing material for a lesson a teacher should take into account certain purposes of a lesson:
a) developing listening comprehension;
b) broadening passive vocabulary and potential foresight skills.
That is why it is essential that material should be comprehensible and having all the qualities listed above. If to speak about grammar constructions used by a teacher during a lesson it is clear he or she cannot use all of them. However, basic structures should be taken into account as students usually memorize the phrases repeated by a teacher as a whole. A teacher has more freedom with lexical material. He or she should include into a lesson new words all the time using such techniques as language guess, context and potential foresight [8, p. 142].
Presenting new material should be carefully dosed and balanced. At first a teacher should give 2-4 new expressions a lesson. Besides he or she should add new elements every lesson. But new material should be brought only in case when a teacher is absolutely sure that the old one has been already memorized. A teacher should also take all the measures so that students could understand it correctly. There are several techniques for gaining it:
- A teacher can vary the forms of pronunciation of the same phrases each lesson. For instance, "read please" can be substituted for "will you read". These variants will not cause troubles in understanding as separate parts of it have been already used by a teacher;
- Each new word should be pronounced 2-3 times suggesting students guessing what it might mean. For example, the expression "raise your hands" has been mentioned before. The phrase "put down your hands" will be easier to understand. This also helps to develop students' abilities to analysis and synthesis;
- new phrases should be repeated in different ways, in 4-5 lessons new phrases may be included in the questions to students so that they could be ready to face them in real life.
That means the dialogue between a teacher and a student becomes the leading part of having students got used to oral speech in foreign language and, thus, the first fundamental step to auding itself.
