Psycholinguistic Background of Training English Discussion Skills in Students of Philology Departments

Abstract

The efficiency of training of students of Philology Departments depends on the level of their communicative skills, that is, their abilities to participate in spontaneous discussion. This arises the issue of training these skills in the English majors. The research intends to determine and analyse the psychological background of Training English discussion skills in students of Philology Departments, to substantiate the difficulties that may arise at the initial stage. The authors analysed theoretical findings and practitioners’ experience on discussion skills training. The survey determined motives of Ukrainian university students for participation in discussions and the obstacles that may arise. The article identifies the attitude of students of Philology Departments towards the problems and issues to be discussed, and the most urgent, interesting and challenging topics for the discussion. The discussion is characterised by the role of communication, motivation, cotextuality, spontaneity, emotional colouring, and the topic of discussion. Age peculiarities of the first-year students have an impact on the learning process and may complicate it. As a social group, students are characterised by confidence in their future profession, a stable attitude towards the chosen profession, while the level of the students’ perceptions of their profession directly correlates with the level of their attitude towards the studies. The results of the survey prove the students’ high motivation, their readiness to communicate and participate in discussions organised by the teachers in class. The topics and problems suggested included personally, professionally, socially and socio-culturally related issues that can be discussed. The most part of the students chose ‘youth problems’ (57%) as the most urgent. The survey gives the opportunity to determine four groups of difficulties/obstacles that most of the students come across when participating in English discussion: psycholinguistic (caused by the nature of the dialogical speech); linguistic (caused by the language); psychological (caused by students); methodological (caused by teaching methods). The findings can be taken into account while conducting the further research on the problem of developing curricula, syllabus, teaching materials and manuals for teaching English as the major in the universities.