Social Sciences and Education Research Review (Dec 2017)
On Some Aspects of Foreign Language Teaching at the Beginning Level
Abstract
When teaching a foreign language, any method or approach is justified if it facilitates the process of language acquisition. We share the view that foreign language teaching should be based on a combination of diverse approaches and methods, as well as various perspectives combining practice and theory. According to our teaching experience, typologically oriented and structure- based teaching combined with the communicative approaches facilitates foreign language learning. It is especially effective in adults’ groups at the very initial stage of learning. Thus, the first /native language of learners serves as a reference point for adult beginners. The principles of our teaching approach are based on the course elaborated by us and tested three times with university students. We argue that along with the contrastive analysis of the native/first language (L1) and the foreign/target language (TL) embracing phonetic-prosodic, morphological-syntactic and lexical-phraseological aspects and all other specific features characteristic of the relation of L1 and TL must be taken into consideration in the teaching process. In case of Persian and Georgian, these are a large amount of Persian loanwords in Georgian as a result of the long-standing intense Persian-Georgian language contacts and adequacy of the Georgian alphabet for the Persian sounds. Envisaging of these factors along with the above- mentioned elementary systemic phonetic-prosodic, grammatical and lexical- phraseological characteristics serves the purpose of facilitating and accelerating the acquisition of TL.
