International Teachers of English Conference Abstracts

Uzbekistan

Web-quests Help to Develop Different Skills in EFL Classes
Svetlana Kolotushkina – Ferghana, Uzbekistan

There are some students who are not always interesting in learning English but they have to do it because of some reasons. A good teacher is one who makes lessons interesting even for lazy and ungifted students. So, if you want to be this kind of person, you should integrate into your lessons internet technologies. As an EFL teacher in senior classes I use on some of my lessons Web quests. It is a best way of involving students, making them interested in the lesson. With the web-quests students can develop lexical units, grammar points, speaking, critical thinking, reading and cooperation as well. Even if teachers don’t have access to the internet, they can make lessons using web-quests even without computers.

Teaching Across Culture
Victor Bychkov - Kokand, Uzbekistan

This presentation will include experiences in getting students accustomed to be taught culture. The participants of this presentation are going to be familiarized with the five C’s chain that can help to understand who we are and who we may wish to become among others in the world community. Because we are different, the question is how to help students discover what they need to look for in learning English. The way the students can be oriented through creativity in language learning to identify similarity to or difference from another culture, maintains interest in appreciation of another culture. Students’ knowledge and activities let them understand culture patterns and cross-cultural activities motivate the students to be doers of activities not only be spectators. My experience can show ways in which cross-cultural education may be relevant to the classroom teacher to prepare young people to respond in our ongoing world.

Using Critical Thinking Activities to Teach Culture in EFL Classroom
Gulchekhra Makhkambaeva & Gulnara Ergasheva - Tashkent, Uzbekistan

This workshop brings together the views and experiences of two teachers who have implemented cross-cultural education in EFL courses. They find that many high school students lack intercultural skills and appreciation to diversity and this causes problems in the school environment. Failure to recognize the roots of cross-cultural issues leads to building stereotypes and prejudice in students. Is there a way to address this challenge?

The session discusses using critical thinking activities to introduce students to cultural diversity around the world, give students a set of skills to interact successfully with those different from them, as well as develop awareness of cross-cultural issues. The presenters will provide guidelines for using this tool and share their experiences using it in the classroom.

Attendees will be able to analyze some typical cross-cultural issues that may develop in a secondary school through participation in various practical activities. Questions will be answered throughout the presentation.

Enhancing Students’ Motivation to Reading through Joint Reading Project
Gulchekhra Makhkambaeva - Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Using the example of a joint reading project between high school students in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Hardin High School in Hardin, Montana, USA, the presenter discusses the ways of making the teaching and learning of literature more meaningful and motivating. The project allows both American and Uzbek to realize that the diversity of opinions reading causes is natural and the way people judge on literature reflects their background and belonging to a particular culture.

It is natural that after having read a literary work we tend to share our impressions about its moral issues, discoveries, expectations, fantasies, images and evaluations with others. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen in the classroom most of the time because of the lack of interaction and effect of the teacher-centered approach overuse. Organizing the joint reading project we aimed this nature of reading and understanding of literary piece work for motivating the students’ reading and their creative participation in post reading discussion.

During this paper presentation attendees will receive recommendations on how to organize joint reading and post reading activities, what to select for reading. The presenter will also share some other ideas that may be built on joint reading.

Using Critical Thinking for Teacher Self-Assessment
Gulnara Ergasheva - Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The presenter will give a brief description of self assessment strategy, including its development, necessity and practical results - the progress teachers all over the world have made using techniques for self-evaluation in their classroom.

The session discusses reflection process and cycle we need to follow to answer “What”, “Why” and “How” questions and improve the quality of teaching. It also contains some useful instructions on how to create self-assessment rubrics and implement them into teaching process.

Attendees will be able to read and analyze two example rubrics for teacher self assessment that can be used and developed in both secondary schools and academic lyceums. Questions will be answered in last 10 minutes of the presentation.

Teaching Foreign Language Pragmatics
Lobar Narzieva - Bukhara, Uzbekistan

This paper begins with an introduction to pragmatics. The philosopher Charles Morris introduced the concept of pragmatics in 1938. Pragmatics is the study of users’ interactions. Speakers can mean more than they say. Pragmatics studies how such utterances affect recipients. Furthermore, pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. Speakers organize what they want to say according to context. With whom, when, and where the speaker is—all these are contextual factors of significance.

Pragmatics studies natural and spontaneous language within different situational contexts. However in language classrooms, students do not typically experience natural language patterns. Additionally, it is impossible to cover the various situations which students might experience in real life. This has prompted researchers (Kasper 1997) to ask whether pragmatics is teachable. Fortunately, studies which examine the role of classroom instruction in learning L2 and FL pragmatics support the benefit of instructional intervention. Instructional intervention is particularly important in the foreign language classroom because foreign language learners have reduced exposure to the target language (Kasper & Rose, 2002). Through instruction, students can obtain information about language features, language use, and language functions which are not immediately salient to them. The classroom might be the only comfortable place where students can ask about background information, discuss culture-specific behavior, share experiences, and experiment with new forms. The main role of instruction is to provide interpretation of language use in terms of how, when, and why certain linguistic practices take place (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003).

Different instructional factors have been discussed in classroom-based research on pragmatics. Among them are teaching approaches and methods, instructional materials, teacher talk, implicit and explicit instruction, learners’ level of proficiency, speech production styles and strategies, and context. All these instructional factors are outlined in the main part of this paper.

The conclusion part addresses the importance of teaching pragmatics in foreign language classroom. According to Bachman (1990) language competence includes two major abilities: organizational competence (the formal structure of the language) and pragmatic competence (the functional use of language). Larsen-Freeman’s “Grammaring” Model emphasizes the connection between form, meaning/semantics and use/pragmatics. EFL learners in Central Asia can have a good knowledge of target-language grammar and vocabulary but they lack pragmatic knowledge, i.e. how to use language appropriately in various contexts.

Giving Clear Instructions to Tasks in a Communicative Way
Yayra Abduraimova Rustamovna - Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Instructions are typically the first step to tasks in EFL classroom. Instructions demand much of the responsibility for setting the tasks accurately and effectively. Unfortunately not all teachers pay enough attention to their instructions; as a result there will be lack of effective product. A workshop is devoted to one of the most important classroom management issues, giving clear instructions to tasks in EFL classroom in a communicative way without using students’ native language. As the instructions given by the teacher to tasks and activities in the language classroom are the keys in completing the tasks effectively the presenter speaks about the importance and the advantages of giving instruction clearly. Hear the presenter will underline some problems such as: discipline problem, problem with time management, and too much teacher talk problem that may occur because of unclear instructions. Moreover the solutions to these set of problems will be suggested by the presenter with the help of different activities where the teachers themselves take part in discussions.

Furthermore, the workshop will be focused on applying some strategies that help the teachers to communicate the instructions appropriately. There will be given some specific strategies that help the teacher to solve problems with giving instructions. Besides that, to make the instructions clear, understandable and interesting to learners, teachers can use different creative ways that motivate the students to complete the task effectively. For this reason there will be given some effective and creative techniques to give instructions to tasks. All the mentioned points will be conducted with the help of variety of activities that help the audience to practice the received information in the process. So, there will be discussed three main points such as: the advantages of giving clear instructions, strategies for making the instructions clear, and some certain techniques for communicating the instructions to students.

Teaching Inferential Thinking
Alevtina Mirakhmedova - Ferghana, Uzbekistan

There are some activities that help students to become aware of Inferential Thinking and to realize how subjective and inaccurate inferences can be. The ensuing discussion should emphasize how often we make inferences without realizing and how often these inferences are wrong and only partially correct. The discussion should touch on stereotyping and how it affects the way we communicate with and relate to others.

Teaching American History (Suffrage - Women’s Rights in the USA)
Galina Nam – Angren, Uzbekistan

English Language is the most popular and most widely spoken language throughout the world. Nowadays the interest of young people in our country in studying English is extremely high. However, along with teaching English, it is also necessary to know the history of the country where it came from. My being in the USA (TEA Program, ACCELS) helped me realize the importance of history in teaching of language. Moreover, the history of a country can become a significant factor to make learners interested in language, spoken in that country. As I know from my own teaching practice, a lot of EFL teachers have no interest in the American history, paying more attention to teaching grammar and vocabulary.

I will consider why it is important to teach the American history and demonstrate some productive methods how to teach one of the most interesting periods in the history of America: suffrage.

I chose this historical period for presentation because of two main reasons. The first important reason is besides widening of outlook and integration of skills practice, the suggested methods (poems, games, writing an argument, and debates) can improve reading, writing, and speaking skills, which is the ultimate goal of today’s foreign language classroom. In addition, those methods will help to teach this topic to a class of students with a variety of abilities.

The other reason is the gender gap in the Central Asian countries. A lot of women in different parts of Central Asia are still not fully fledged members of societies. Learners will get benefit if they know why many American women stopped being passive in their society and started to voice their opinions publicly, in reference to politics, religion, and the position of women in a society.

Using PBL (Project Based On Learning) and Long-lasting Collaborational Projects in Education
Natalya Hamidova – Karshi, Uzbekistan

I would like to share with my experience using PBL (project based on learning) and long-lasting collaborational projects foreign countries in the classroom. I am going to explain what use does this method bring, how it influences on further learning of English language by the students and how to organize the process of working with PBL in the classroom.

Most teachers do not speak English in our classes where traditional methods tend to predominate and where students’ achievements in English are determined by their written exam scores. We live in the age of information technologies, foreign language teachers; especially English language teachers should be always leading implementing new teaching methods and techniques. To reflect the facts I have written above I will make a Power Point presentation with the results and the process of working with the most successful PBL my students and I have completed the last 2 years, the things my students learned. Then I am going to present you a long-lasting collaborational project with a foreign country that my students and I completed this month, what were the results of collaborating with native speakers by the help of Internet resources. The last part will be a list of activities and thing you should do with your partner school in order to plan, complete and evaluate a successful project based on learning.

During the presentation I will focus on explaining what does the PBL give besides improving language skills, that it develops the traits like: tolerance and intercultural understanding, creative thinking and learning though analyzing the facts, work in groups and development of leadership among students.

Songs as Magic Motivators for University Students
Ivetta Gennadyevna Balayants – Samarkand, Uzbekistan

The necessity to improve the level of education at high institutional levels is obvious nowadays. I am deeply convinced that creating collaborative atmosphere in the classroom, intellectual and informational approaches in teaching, teaching students to derive generalizations, deductive conclusions as well as developing debating abilities and individual study abilities help to achieve full students’ participation and motivate them to study. Moreover, being patient and tolerant, prompt and punctual, open-hearted and friendly, being able to listen and hear makes a teacher a role-model for students. A teacher should also be an example of a good planner and organizer. A lot of EFL teachers consider Lesson Planning to be one of the most essential skills of the competent teacher (a map). Many teachers will find it easier to use a course book. There are advantages and disadvantages of having a course book. Although they do provide a ready made structure for teaching material, it is very unlikely that the material was written for the teachers' particular students. Each class is different and teachers need to be able to adapt material from whatever source so that is suitable for their students. A course book can certainly help planning, but it cannot replace the teacher's own ideas for what he or she wants to achieve in a class. Modern methodologists consider developing of speaking and listening skills to be of the supreme importance. One of the greatest ways to improve these skills and to motivate students is using songs in EFL class. Rather than being stifled, the classroom atmosphere would be so relaxed that learners are not frightened of speaking.

Most teachers have a variety of activities to use with songs. Lyrics can be easily found on the internet and there are many opportunities to exploit language in songs. A great number of pre-, during- and post-listening activities can be used at the lessons: students can write surveys to do with the class to find out the top five favorite bands; students can be actively involved in group-work and pair-work as well as role-plays and debates; students can fill in some missing words in the lyrics. Students themselves can be involved in creating activities to use with their favorite songs. One of the main aims is to give students confidence in expressing themselves orally. The emphasis is therefore, on spoken fluency rather than on spoken accuracy. This should encourage students to be confident and creative in their spoken English. My presentation will show how I used a song to teach a specific lesson. The teachers (other participants) will work as an advanced-level class, going different tasks (warm-up, reading, during listening and speaking activities) with the focus on developing of listening and speaking skills.

Using Short Stories as a Warm-up
Zulfiyahon Rahimova and Botir Jafarov – Namangan, Uzbekistan

We want to present a workshop which can be used at home reading classes. All we need is short stories. We usually use short stories as a warm-up. The stories are not intended to teach new material to the learners, although they may encounter new words and unfamiliar grammatical structures. The purpose is to stimulate speaking practice, and to provide reading and listening practice. By telling the stories, the students will develop skill at the discourse level, learning to link sentences to the final punch line. Weaving the sentences together in connected speech is an essential skill for successful communication. Short stories may be used in different ways.

Do you want to know about them? Come to our workshop and find out about the interesting warm-up games with short stories! You can find out about the games such as: Chain stories, Tell me your story, Write with prompts, and Who knows the most?

Life as a Festival
Olima Irgasheva – Samarkand, Uzbekistan

It is very useful to enable students to learn something about foreign holidays as it creates cultural awareness, relaxing atmosphere, students learn the new words quickly and easily and it is a lot of fun! My poster will display several holidays: some of them are well known and some of them are not. There will also be plenty of riddles, puzzles, games, which people play on these holidays. (It is difficult sometimes to display a game, so some of them will be in the handouts.) Almost all of these activities will involve practice of some grammar points, which I think will encourage teachers to use them as they will not just have fun but practice some grammar points, causing problems. The poster will also have some features of Advent Calendar, which will draw (I hope) everybody’s attention. I think it would be a good idea to use such posters in the classrooms, to keep them on the wall all year round, changing the holidays from time to time, according to the current holiday.

The Essential Question 'What Do We Want?
Tatyana Salieva – Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Has there ever been a profession that was at the same time so underappreciated yet so rewarding, so frustrating and so utterly fulfilling, a profession where tiny steps and minor victories mean so very much to the lives of others? Teaching is more than a job, more than a profession. It is a vocation, a calling to open minds to the wonders and possibilities of the world in which we live. The best teachers know that education is a lifelong journey and that teaching a child to want to learn is more important than any single lesson.

Very often we hear the phrase: ’My child is lucky, s/he has a good teacher.’ What makes people think like this? Once I read a parable ‘Flowers Are Red’ by Harry Chapin. The two teachers the boy met are vivid examples of bad and good teachers. Speaking about the way of teaching in schools today we can see that some teachers still practice reading aloud in turns, translation the whole paragraphs into mother tongue, copying the long lists of words for memorizing out of the context, learning texts and dialogues by heart without any comprehension. While there are teachers whose lessons are student-centered, have a variety of activities and are given in a friendly way. They are communicative and appropriate for students of different learning styles.

If the teachers are motivated, enthusiastic and ready to enjoy themselves, the children will usually take their lead. My work experience is sixteen years. I worked in a secondary school and kindergarten. Now I work in the Language centre. I am also a local teacher trainer. I think I know the difficulties of teachers and students. So I have come to the most essential question ‘What do the teachers and the students want?’ Once while preparing a presentation for one of our usual monthly UzTEA meetings I came across a story in the Forum magazine. The question which was asked there was ‘What do women want most?’ After I had read it I came to the conclusion that not only women but everyone including teachers and students want choice most.

Ways of Learning Improving Students’ Problem Solving Skills
Dildora Tashpulatova - Namangan, Uzbekistan

In a classroom a teacher deals with students having different needs, interests, habits, talents and level of knowledge. That makes him/her think of the choice of the material and other resources. There are some methods which can fit many kinds of learners. However, best results can be achieved by an individual approach. For a teacher it is really hard to manage lessons, make sure that everybody understands the theme or is involved and for this reason make the entire process perfect. Therefore, I have been considering the possibility of student learning the suggested material effectively by solving different educational and academic problems having his teacher as an advisor. In other words students should be taught to be able to solve particular situational problems. They should understand themselves clearly to decide what ways they learn are best for them. This, nevertheless, doesn’t mean that a teacher becomes a passive observer, on the contrary, the teacher is challenged to be more active. In my proposal I would like to discuss a number of ways of finding the appropriate techniques that would help students be able to educate themselves, in some degree, independently.

Vocabulary Practice through Games in Teaching English.
Manzura Shamsitdinova and Durdona Khodirova– Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Games are an important part of a teacher’s activity. Although they are recreational activities by nature whose main purpose is enjoyment, in language learning process their purpose is no reinforce what has already been taught. In the course of a game, learns are engaged in an enjoyable and challenging activity with a clear goal. Often, students are so involved in playing the games that they do not realize they are practicing language.

In addition to spelling and grammar, games can provide practice in another key language area: vocabulary. Such games facilitate initial practice and periodic revision of vocabulary in enjoyable context, thus making classroom vocabulary study an amusing and satisfying experience for teacher and student alike. Some games are played with the whole class, often with the students divided into two teams, while others can be played in pairs or small groups.

Evaluating an American Poetry Project
Rima Ambartsumyan – Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The aim of the workshop is to share experiences and observations teaching English through interactive methods with American poetry. These approaches promote interpersonal relations, intensive learning, active participation, and language development. The presenter describes and demonstrates how poetry helps learners communicate, understand, and learn the values and backgrounds of two peoples. The activities provide opportunities for real communication and chances to use language freely. They can be adapted to different levels of language, knowledge, and ability.

The workshop has two parts. The first concentrates on several poems and various interactive tasks. The presenter demonstrates teaching techniques accommodating various learning styles and encouraging students to become self –motivated learners. Selected poems represent themes related to society and culture. Student writing samples (cinquains, stanzas, limericks, diamante, pyramid) show the techniques of effectiveness. These activities help develop critical thinking abilities, improve creativity, responsibility, independence in sharing their ideas, and problem solving.

The second part shows the results of an American poetry project. It includes students’ analysis where the students explore, compare and contrast the lifestyles, values and behaviors of two peoples. Students’ journals, compositions, poetry evaluation and “backtalk box” entries, teachers’ dialog journals and recommendations are provided.

Poetry allows students to bypass minor grammar points and go straight to meaning. The poetry project and teaching techniques create a warm classroom rapport, powerful force for motivating students developing cultural identity and individual fulfillment. These interactive activities change the students’ attitudes towards learning. Students become more interested, motivated, and involved in their learning processes.

The workshop aims to share experiences and observations teaching EFL through interactive methods with American poetry. These interactive approaches promote student self-motivation and develop interpersonal relations, intensive learning, active participation, and language skills.