In March, academic staff and students of Faculty of Humanities and Poltava Oil and Gas College of National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” did a three-week online course on improving the academic speaking skills titled “Practise Your PTE Academic Speaking Skills” from Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). The English language teachers and scientists from different parts of the world visited numerous practical classes and discussed foreign language skills, the use of examples and details for illustrating spoken language, the issue of correct pronunciation etc.
Academicians of Faculty of Humanities, Doctor of Philology, Professor of Germanic Philology and Translation Department of National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” Tetiana Kushnirova, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of Germanic Philology and Translation Department Anna Pavelieva and Teacher of Germanic Philology and Translation Department Svitlana Manhura took active part in the course and the discussion of its topics. In March,philology teachers and experts of Oxford University discussed the most pressing problems of language teaching, learned innovative teaching methods and exchanged the experience of teaching foreign languages at webinars from the British Council.
The course “Practise Your PTE Academic Speaking Skills” lasted for three studying weeks and covered the following topics:
- The first week of studying included seventeen topics and was focused on such key factors in speaking as the pace and speed of speaking.
- The second week consisted of eleven topics. It was focused on the use of examples and details to provide illustration during speaking - from how to logically build your response, describe pictures and retell texts, to the correct choice of the lexical units that you need in order to do so.
- The third week of studying consisted from fourteen topics and was focused on phonetics and vocabulary.
According to Doctor of Philology, Professor of Germanic Philology and Translation Department at National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” Tetiana Kushnirova, continuous improvements of speaking skills is extremely important for philologists, since there cannot be too much speaking practice.
“Personally for me, the experience of taking part in online courses on phonetics and vocabulary isn’t new - this summer, I did a course on improving speaking skills for the IELTS examination, provided by Macquarie University. I really liked the informative contents of the course, because beside the learning text, audio and video materials it contained tests, written and oral tasks, useful additional materials, such as grammar tables, the most common idioms, metaphors, phrasal verbs, parenthetic constructions that are necessary for the development of speaking skills. And the exercises were created by native speakers. Considerable advantages of this course include the large number of time-limited speaking tasks (for example, learners are asked to described a picture in 40 seconds, paraphrase the text they just listened to in half a minute, or speak up on an offered topic in 40 seconds). This time I decided to participate in this course together with my 1-4th year students within the subjects “Practical English Course” and “Practical Oral and Written Translation (English)”,” PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of Germanic Philology and Translation Department at National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” Anna Pavelieva commented.
Teacher of Germanic Philology and Translation Department of Poltava Polytechnic Svitlana Manhura participated in this course organized by the Australian university together with her students of Education and Research Institute of Oil and Gas.
In total, 55 students of Faculty of Humanities and Poltava Oil and Gas College of National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” trained their practical speaking skills and received certificate of attendance of this course.
Macquarie University is ranked in the best 1% of world university and is ranked among the world top-40 linguistic universities having one of the best faculties of European (including Slavic) languages and foreign language departments in the world. Many experts of the university focus on the preparation for English language examinations. The Australian national dictionary, Macquarie Dictionary, was developed at this university.
The teachers of Faculty of Humanities of National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” are thankful to their Australian colleagues for the unique opportunity for improving their own professional level and motivating the students’ interest to foreign language learning.
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