7.4.3. Four faces of a situation

A communicative situation is formed by four factors: 1) setting, i.e. places, circumstances and outsiders included; 2) relations between the participants; subjectively a partner’s personality is meant; 3) speech intentions; 4) realisation of a communicative act itself which creates a new setting, new speech intentions. Each of the factors mentioned above influences both participants’ speech in a certain way, affecting the choice of the subject, the course of its development, the choice of language means, emotional colouring of speech and the like. Since a communicative situation is an indispensable item of oral communication, modelling typical communicative situations is one of the main principles of teaching oral speech. According to this principle, the programme of teaching oral speech should be constructed primarily as a subsequent series of typical communicative situations selected and elaborated in accordance with communicative, didactic and education purposes. Any topic included into the syllabus should be revealed as a set of certain typical communicative situations.

While modelling typical communicative situations, a teacher should briefly characterise setting and participants’ relations and should also provide a distinct communicative task (purpose) for each of the partners.

7.4.4. System of exercises in teaching dialogical speech

The special system of exercises for teaching dialogical speech includes the following groups of exercises:

1. exercises aimed at acquiring dialogical replies;

• exercises aimed at acquiring responsive replies;

• exercises aimed at acquiring initiative replies;

2. exercises aimed at acquiring DUs:

• exercises aimed at acquiring speech formulas and clichés within DUs;

• exercises aimed at acquiring different kinds of DUs;

3. exercises aimed at acquiring MDs;

4. exercises aimed at creating dialogues of different functional types by students on the basis of a communicative situation.

It should be noted that teaching dialogical speech within a cycle of lessons is conducted according to a certain system. During the first lessons of the cycle speech grammar and lexical habits are formed, as a rule. These habits serve a basis for formation of speech skills, dialogical skills of speaking included, during the follow-up lessons in the cycle.

E.g. Cycle 2 of the 6^th form textbook comprises 15 lessons. Teaching dialogue begins with the sixth lesson of the cycle. However, the preparatory work for teaching dialogue already starts at the first lesson of the cycle. The preparatory work includes introducing new phrases that are to be assimilated in dialogical speech within the given cycle. A teacher should widely use these phrases in his speech in both real-life communicative and stimulated communicative situations.

Thus, with the purpose of introducing ready-made phrases used as responses to someone’s gratitude a teacher may congratulate a pupil on the victory in a sport competition, on his excellent mark or on his birthday. The natural response to congratulation would be expressing gratitude with the phrase ‘Thank you’ or ‘Thank you very much’, familiar to pupils since the 5^th form. A teacher will response with the phrase which is new, unfamiliar to pupils: ‘Not at all/ Don’t mention it/ You’re welcome/ It’s a pleasure’, etc. It is essential that a teacher’s phrase should be personally addressed. His gestures and mimics are also important. Ready-made phrases should be present in pattern dialogues that pupils hear on tape. The phonogram is to demonstrate the level of dialogical communication the learners are to achieve by the end of their work on the topic under study. Thus, before performing exercises of the first group the preparatory work aimed at mastering dialogical speech should be done parallel to the formation of lexical and grammatical habits within each cycle of classroom activities.