Teaching curve

The effectiveness of teaching achieved in the result of exercise performance is determined by the following major factors:

· the teacher’s correct distributing the sequence of exercises in time;

· understanding the main principle or major scheme of actions performance;

· the learner’s awareness of the results of the performed action;

· the influence of previously assimilated knowledge and formed skills at a given moment of teaching;

· rational correlation of reproducing and producing.

The process of teaching as a whole is characterised by both progressive qualitative and quantitative changes in knowledge adopted, habits formed and skills developed and their use in various situations. This process is graphically reflected as the teaching curve, or the curve of exercises. Acad. Petrovskydistinguishes between two types of the teaching curves: curves with negative acceleration and curves with positive acceleration.

1. Curves with negative acceleration are characterised by fast habit formation at the initial stage and its gradual slowing down until it reaches some limited level of development.

2. Curves with positive acceleration are characterised by the gradual speeding up of habit formation throughout the process of teaching.

In the process of habit formation there sometimes occurs a period of relative stability of advancement. During this period a learner ‘stands still’, i.e. he is neither progressing nor regressing. Such a situation in the teaching process is called a plateau. This phenomenon indicates the fact that either the content or the techniques of teaching, or maybe the manner of seatwork, or probably all these taken together have exhausted themselves. M.S. Shekhterstresses that habit formation, i.e. automation of operations and their free usage at the same time cannot be reached in the situation of a plateau. The teacher should use some new, different approach or a new system of exercises to provide the learners with a new operational orientation basis for effective habit formation.

At the same time, a new operational orientation basis serves the purpose of habit transfer. The transfer of a habit is performed on the basis of generalisation and is the inner mechanism of teaching. It presupposes the teacher’s purposeful work not only at organising the sequence of exercises but also at selecting language input to be trained.

The general structure of the learner’s knowledge, habits and skills changes in the process of teaching. They become increasingly generalised, contracted, less controlled by consciousness while performed. This change in the structure of the learner’s activity is due to the change in the teaching techniques provided in exercises. The change occurs: a) in the subjective aspect of the activity, i.e. in the way of performing operations, b) in the controlling aspect, i.e. in the ways of control and c) in the evaluative aspect, i.e. in the way of regulating activities.

a) As for the way of operation performance, the previously isolated operations gradually intermingle into a more complex action. In the process, redundant, unnecessary elements of the operations are dropped out. This results in the acceleration of tempo and the perfection of quality of operation performance.

b) At the same time, the control shifts from external visual (or aural) to inner muscle, kinaesthetic one, the so-called inner muscle feeling.

c) Simultaneously, the character of central regulation of operations changes. Attention gets freed from the reception of operation technique and shifts mainly to a situation and the result of operations.

Thus, we may say that the change of the operation itself in the process of teaching reflects qualitative progressive change of the whole activity in general. That is why the teacher should always focus his attention on all the three aspects of the teaching activity while students are performing operations.