Hierarchy of Modern Theories, Methods and Approaches to Teaching Foreign Languages

Abstract

In today’s competence-based paradigm of language education, the priority direction is the development and formation of students’ not only productive foreign language speech skills and language skills that contribute to the creation of written and oral texts of various genres, but also the skills of interaction and mediation in the global digital space. It is possible to develop the above-mentioned skills using effective approaches, methods, technologies. Modern methodological literature presents an extremely wide variety of methodological models, pedagogical theories, specific technologies and approaches to teaching foreign languages. This article is devoted to the development of a general theoretical basis for the hierarchy of existing methods, approaches, methods of teaching foreign languages within the framework of a competent-based, communicatively oriented paradigm of modern education. The proposed hierarchy includes 4 levels, where the theoretical foundation of education is based on a certain psychological and pedagogical theory; the essence of learning activity corresponds to the general theoretical method, the principles of learning — to private methods, the learning process — to a system of tasks. Each level is responsible for a certain range of “didactic potential”. The essence of the lower level is the ways of implementing knowledge, and the up100 per one is the management of information transfer processes in the activity-based model of learning. This system is very important, because the hierarchically organized structure of methods allows instructors to understand how particular methods contribute to the achievement of the goals of teaching foreign languages. The article analyzes the psychological and pedagogical theories valid for the modern system of education — cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism. The typological characteristics are given for the classification of teaching methods, the main types of problem-oriented tasks are identified for the development of students’ foreign language skills.

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