Differentiated Teaching of English Oral Monologic Production to Law Students: Objectives and Content

Abstract

Background: Among numerous issues of differentiated teaching, the problem of building competence in oral monologic production in Law students – considering the level of independence and knowledge of students – has not been studied in depth yet. This causes difficulties for providing qualitative foreign language (FL) education to Law majors who have not attained the appropriate level in FL communicative competence in conditions of homogenous training groups. Purpose. The article aims to define objectives and content of differentiated teaching of English oral monologic production to Law students. Results. The paper has proved that Law students shall be able to make up monologues in the genre of report-presentation of the three functional types, i.e. narration, description, reasoning (justification and retraction), having mastered their lingual and extralingual peculiarities. Lexico-semantic and grammatical characteristics of each of the three functional types of monologues have been defined. The report-presentation is determined as a short report up to ten minutes (based on well-studied sources of information) supported with the demonstration of the objects, which are the subject matter of the report. The triad of the categories of monologic production is essential when teaching law students, namely those of the quantity of information, the quality of information and the means of information submission. To enhance English monologic production skills in Law students, individual and psychological characteristics of learners, their cognitive needs, communicative abilities, motivation, independence, professional mindset as well as professional activity should be taken into account. Discussion. A set of criteria to evaluate the outcomes of the learning process and assess individual progress of students has been developed. The following criteria as for the assessment of spontaneous oral production were defined: the ease of production, the scope of the utterance, the meaningful completeness and the level of realization of the communicative intent, the contextual and grammatical integrity, linguistic literacy. Prepared oral production was evaluated based on the criteria of informativeness, adherence to the compositional peculiarities of a certain functional type of a report, the contextual completeness and the level of realization of communicative intent, the contextual and grammatical integrity, linguistic literacy). The category of the quantity of information provides for the integration of monologic production with professional knowlege of a lawyer who has to be able to use both: declarative and procedural knowledge – facts, data, models as well as the algorithms of solving professional tasks. While developing monologues, a Law student shall represent the sufficient amount of information for the theme exposure, for the justification or retraction of their thoughts. The category of quality of information in the lawyer’s speech is regulated by the criteria of relevance and novelty. According to the category of the means of information submission, the student has to choose those verbal means of communication, which can reflect the author’s idea, can be appropriately understood by native speakers, correspond to the style of communication, provide its cohesion and coherence.