Lesson as the main organisational unit of teaching

Lessons are events that are fairly easy to recognise. They take place in a particular setting: a school or classroom. They normally involve two kinds of participants (the teacher and students), and they normally consist of recognisable kinds of activities (e.g., the teacher lecturing at the front of the class, the teacher posing questions and calling on students to answer them). A lesson is, hence, distinguishable from other kinds of speech events, such as meetings, debates, arguments, or trials.

Like other speech events, lessons are purposeful activities aimed to attain communicative efficiency in the target language as the terminal behaviour sought for.

The main organisational form of the teaching process in school is the lesson, or practical class, complemented by students’ self-dependent work in the oral speech laboratory and at home, as well as by the extra-curricular activity. The major means of teaching are textbook, printed and audio-visual teaching aids.

A foreign language lesson, being the main organisational unit of the teaching process, is both one of its parts and its autonomous integral link. A lesson meets the same general didactic and methodological requirements which are put forward towards the whole teaching process. Every foreign language lesson should be subject to the didactic requirements of: a) the unity of teaching and developing; b) the scientific character of the content of teaching material and methods of its acquisition; c) being based on the experimental data of age psychology. These requirements, in spite of their general character, have their own specification in every subject taught in school. Such requirements as the regard of language material particularities, the proper choice of information sources and of techniques of teaching for every lesson stage, realising the subject integration are still more specific for a foreign language lesson.

A lesson synthesises teaching regularities, aims, content and methods in their integral interaction. A lesson realises a methodological concept lying in the basis of teaching. That is why the problems concerning a lesson are usually considered within the problems of methodology and organisation of a cycle of lessons.

The methodological essence of a foreign language lesson is twofold: 1) it determines the main organisational form of mastering speech activity in L2; 2) it is realised in forming speech habits and developing speech skills on the basis of comprehensible language input. A student left out of verbal communication in the lesson, becomes a passive viewer of other students’ activity. Doing homework and labwork is the logical continuation of a lesson. Nevertheless, this self-dependent student’ work can by no means substitute teacher and student interactive and interdependent activity at the lesson, aimed at realising stage-to-stage objectives and achieving the final goals.

Thus, a foreign language lesson can be defined as a completed, cyclically repeated fragment of teaching/learning work, devoted to achieving definite practical (communicative), educational, cultural and developing objectives.

The practical objective is understood as mastering language material as the vehicle of oral and written communication up to the level of communicative efficiency and is achieved through involving students into communicative activity. The educational objective is realised as broadening students’ general outlook and providing them with necessary information on the L2 realia, culture and traditions and is achieved in the process of conscious work at meaningful language material of high educational potential. The developing objective is understood as developing students’ intellect, memory and attention processes, the power of imagination and so on. The main means of achieving this objective are problem-solving tasks, discovery techniques, information gap activities and other activities of creative nature. The cultural objective is closely connected with developing a student’s personality: forming humanistic qualities, developing co-operation, loyalty, purposefulness, responsibility and other positive traits.