Exercises of group 3. These activities are designed to teach students to produce monological utterances at the text level

These activities are designed to teach students to produce monological utterances at the text level. Monological utterances should respond the required functional-semantic type of monologue under study. These activities are productive communicative exercises of the 2^nd, higher level. They include a communicative task, provided by a teacher, and a student’s utterance. The communicative task is to motivate a student’s utterance, is to induce him to participation in a communicative activity and is to define the range of verbal context. E.g. Topic ‘Sochi’, the 8^th form:

Task: Your groupmates and you are going to Sochi on your holidays. You have already visited the place and have taken some pictures of the town. Show the slides and describe the places you like best (the expected utterance is monologue-description with elements of storytelling).

Monological utterances can be either prepared or unprepared in advance. The unprepared utterance is produced just after receiving a communicative instruction. Students’ utterances concerning such everyday topics as ‘About Oneself’, ‘One’s Family’, ‘School’, ‘House’ and the like should be unprepared. This is so because there is no need to look for any additional material, to specify facts, figures and so on. Although it doesn’t mean that a teacher should not prepare his students for such an utterance at all. It is exercises of the 1^st and the 2^nd groups that lead to producing utterances at the text level.

Prepared monological speech deals mostly with topics of political, social, cultural, geographic background of language teaching. Verbal cues are not usually used, though sometimes they are possible if students’ speech habits and skills are poor. Thus, proper nouns, geographical names and figures concerning the topic can be given either to every student or on the board beforehand. The usage of illustrative cues should be natural. For instance, while modelling a situation of a guided excursion round a city or a museum, it would be natural to use a series of slides showing some sights or exhibits as a guide is telling his tourists about what they can see.

On the other hand, topical pictures (a room with furniture articles, a shop window with lots of goods in it) should be used at the stage of introducing new lexical items or new grammar structures but not while teaching monologue. Too many details impede students’ thinking ability, restrict their utterances and undermine their communicative intentions.