Kinds of control

The mentioned above kinds of control are distinguished according to the stage of learning and the control function, or the processing and resulting aspects of habits and skills formation.

Current control is related to the preparatory level. This level presupposes training new language input and automating operations with it up to the level of a habit. Thus, current control refers to measuring the degree of formation of lexical and grammatical operations constituting the habit. Current control involves administering frequent, short tests to measure students’ achievements and to assign marks for their work at a given lesson/ unit or a topic. It is not connected with any cycles and can be performed at every lesson on any kind of learning material. In the process of current control the feedback function dominates. On the basis of its scores the teacher obtains information of the efficiency/ inefficiency of the teaching/ learning process organisation. This information enables him to correct both his own activity and the students’ activity in time.

Interim control is aimed at checking up the level of new language input acquisition in large amounts. It can be done after the teaching material has been learned for a long period of time (a term or a semester). Interim control helps revealing the general picture of students’ progress in class.

Thematic control is aimed at checking up the degree of new language input acquisition within the theme/ topic under study, as well as the extent of mastery of the corresponding speech habits and skills.

Final control is designed to check up the degree of mastery of speech habits and skills at the end of each year of study.

All three kinds (interim, thematic and final) of control can be characterised as summing up control. Summing up controlis related to the level of language input actuation in speech. In other words, the speech level is connected with communicative activity, whilst the notion of summing up control is referred to checking up the fact and the degree of speech habit perfection. It is the assessment function of control that becomes most important in the course of summing up testing. This is so because the aim of all these check up tasks is to elicit and evaluate the degree of students’ progress in mastering habits and skills during a given period of time or a certain stage of learning.

Thus, habit control presupposes bringing to light the result of teaching a certain word, grammatical phenomenon, revealing the degree of a language item acquisition to be used in communicative activity. In such a case, a speech habit is viewed as the achieved result of mastery of a language item or grammatical phenomenon. This result is manifested in consolidation, coordination and interaction of all operations constituting the habit and providing functioning language items in speech. In this respect, habit control is summing up in nature. We can consider some isolated actions or a group of actions forming the habit in the same light. In that way habit formation, or rather the extent of formation, is viewed as summing up control, but exercised currently. So, in real life teaching both major kinds – current and summing up control – intervene and interact to support each other. The fact is, control, exercised in teaching systematically and aimed at interim objects, is current in nature. Its aim is the measurement of the level, some definite stage of automation, or certain, though interim, result. This makes it possible to speak about summing up control.

As for speech skill control, notions of current and summing up control are also applied, for mastery of communicative activity can be regarded as a process and a result too. Speech skill as a result of verbal activity is a complex, multi-dimension formation, comprising a number of sub-skills, mastery of which is achieved on the sequential basis. The sequence of mastering these sub-skills is the content of speech acquisition. At the same time, control of speech skills is related to topics and typical communicative situations, which are numerous in language teaching and which are regarded as a definite result of teaching.