The technique of comprehensible input

Compresensible input is that amount of teacher's speech in the foreign language which in spite of including items unknown to learners can be under­stood by them. Some examples of comprehensible input technique are given below (the words unknown to students are given in bold) [73, 45].

/. The teacher starts a talk.

What's your name? — Ira. — Children, please look at Ira. She has fair hair. Her hair is short— cut. And my hair is long-cut. Her hair is not long. It is short."

Then the teacher involves students into communication .

"Let's talk together. Those who give full answers to my questions get three points. Those who give short answers get one point only. Let's see who the winner is.

"What is the name of this girl with fair short— hair? Where is the girl with

fair short-cut hair standing: on the right of the table or on the left of the table ?"

"Tell me the names of other students having short-cut fair hair". "What hair

does Nastya have: long-cut or short-cut?" "Is her hair fair or black?" "Take the

book and give it to a girl with fair short-cut hair. How many girls with black long-

cut hair can we see in the class-room ?" What kind of hair does your neighbour have? ""Tell your friend that Ira has short— cut fair hair." etc.

2.          The teacher takes a notice of the learners' difficulty with understanding the
word age, while reading ("The woman was still able to work at her age.")

Her/his actions are as follows: "Cheer up, in a moment you'll easily compre­hend the word. For example, I'm sixty, so my age is sixty.— How old are you? You are 18. So your age is 18. — And what is your mother's age? So, she is 40 years of age. Are you and your close friend of the same age? Ask Igor what age he is." etc.

3. I see you don't know what "colon" means. I'll try to explain it to you. There
are many punctuation marks. You know that this one (,) is a comma. (And the
teacher writes it on the chalkboard) That one (.) is a dot. (And the teacher writes a
dot on the chalkboard). Now, tell me: Can we write a dot over a dot? Let's do it (:).
Now you've written two dots in a colon. This punctuation mark is called a colon.

4. What's "afternoon "? Listen and you'll understand it. Afternoon is the time
between the middle of the day and the beginning of the evening when the sun goes
down, e.g.: In the morning I leave home and every afternoon I'm at school. But
on Sunday afternoon at 12 a.m. I'm going to attend an afternoon concert in the
Opera House. And at what time do you think babies have a sleep after dinner?
What do people usually do in the afternoon of the 31^s' of December!

Comprehensible input of the teacher should be as rich as possible for it helps learners in understanding foreign language thus involving them into speech com­munication. Owing to it unknown lexical and grammatical items can be easily satiated with definite meaningful contents. It also helps the teacher solve some unexpected problems at the lesson and stimulate learners' guess-work [73, 51].

Comprehensible Input refers to utterances produced by the teacher that his learners understand based on the context in which they are used and on the language in which they are phrased. The means of application of Com­prehensible Input is plentiful exposure of learners to those utterances, i.e. to language in use. It gives them plenty of opportunities to use the language in real-life tasks or close-to— life communication. If teacher's comprehensible input is rich speech becomes clear without translation [73, 55].

There are a great lot of methods of teaching foreign languages, each hav­ing its specific methodological techniques. That's why in one text-book of a foreign language there can be used techniques tending toward different teaching methods.

The following two basic notions of methodology are the method and ap­proach, which are closely interconnected.

An approach is a dominating scientific idea of solving the main tasks of teaching. An approach is an axiom, a method is a procedure which shows how to implement the approach practically. For example:

1 .The Translation Method is based on the Translation Approach which says that to teach the language is possible only with the help of translation. That's why all the techniques and exercises of the Translation Method are connected with translation.

2. The Communicative Methods are based on the Communicative Ap­proach which says that to teach the language is possible only by means of teaching speech functions instead of linguistic laws. That's why all the tech­niques and exercises of the Communicative Method are connected with real-life speech tasks.

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