COMMUNICATIVE READING AND ORAL RETELLING IN STUDYING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AS A MAJOR SUBJECT (BASED ON THE GERMAN LANGUAGE MATERIAL)

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show some of the learning opportunities provided by reading and retelling informative texts on various topics in a foreign language to prepare students for a future career. The subject area of the article applies to studying the ways of building students’ communication skills while teaching them a foreign language as a major subject. The specific topic focuses on using text reconstruction techniques for oral retelling as one of the ways of communication skills training. For illustrative purposes, culture-oriented texts are examined. The descriptive and structural methods are employed in this study. The results of the study demonstrate how to build students’ communication skills using different text reconstruction techniques for oral retelling. The research findings have considerable practical value for lecturers who teach such courses as ‘Practical German’ and ‘Methods of teaching a foreign language’ at a language department at a university. The conclusions of the study are as follows: 1) informative texts on various topics provide students with favourable learning opportunities since the information presented in texts corresponds to students’ interests, may stimulate students to some extent, and facilitate their learning awareness; 2) retelling a text orally for educational purposes implies the syntactic simplification of the source text, the replacement of new (unknown) words with more learned vocabulary words, the use of indirect speech or other descriptive words instead of direct speech, and, if necessary, the information reduction; 3) text reconstruction is an essential component in retelling the source text because it allows students to build the skills needed to speak with confidence; 4) learning texts by heart also provides a certain learning opportunity for students, however, it is more based on speech imitation than on the self-conscious construction of speech utterances

Keywords

• communicative reading
• oral retelling
• reconstruction of linguistic form
• language knowledge
• communication skills
• learning outcomes