Formation of writing skills

CONCLUSION
Since this course is designed for younger students who are not yet fully prepared for a purely academic method of teaching, game tasks occupy a significant place in it. The main purpose of these tasks is to consolidate students' strong associations with the spelling of a word and the reality behind the word, the sound of the whole word and its individual letters.
In the textbook by Vereshchagina and Pritykina , game tasks are used very actively (team and role-playing games with puppets, masks, etc.). A feature of this textbook is that muscular motor skills are constantly involved in the learning process (tasks related to the implementation of physical exercises, and tasks that include the production of didactic material - for example, finger puppets - by the students themselves). This, in our opinion, also has a beneficial effect on the degree of success in teaching writing skills associated with the development of fine motor skills of the hand. A universal game exercise is to fill in simple crossword puzzles (using pictures and without pictures). This is one of the very old forms of game assignments (such assignments are still used in manuals of the 1950s-60s, domestic and foreign). The didactic value of this type of task is not only that it helps to fix in the minds of students the connection between the word and reality, the word and its interpretation (gradual preparation for understanding the metalinguistic, according to R. Jacobson, language function), but also in the fact that it develops students' attention to the lettering of the word, which helps to prevent some further errors in the spelling of a particular word (if the word is incorrectly entered in the cells of the crossword puzzle, it will be impossible to guess and enter those words that intersect with this word). Meanwhile, various kinds of errors (on the typology of errors when writing in English, including English as non-native, see) in the spelling of words , both English and Russian, are very characteristic of younger students precisely because of their insufficiently developed writing skills. In the textbook T.B. Klementieva 's game assignments are fewer than in other manuals analyzed here, due to the fact that this textbook is designed for older children and is written in a more “academic” way (this is due to the specifics of the Russian (formerly Soviet) methods of teaching foreign languages), however they are present. Along with the "classic" game tasks, you can find more original ones there. An example is a task that is aimed at memorizing new lexemes in oral and written form. The game resembles a lotto: the players move the chips around the playing field in accordance with the points dropped on the die and enter the words written on the playing field into “chamomiles”, in which only the first letters of the words are indicated.