The use of proverbs and anti-proverbs in teaching english to secondary school students

Abstract

Language and culture co-study issues have a permanent tendency to be interpreted from the view point of socio-cultural competence. In this regard, a foreign language teacher faces the problem of creating pedagogical conditions for the effective development of linguistic and socio-cultural competencies of students in order to acquire the ability to use a foreign language in the process of intercultural communication. As one of the ways to solve this problem, the authors of the article suggest using authentic proverbial material in the process of teaching a foreign language. The authors believe that the national culture and modern language trends are most fully and vividly manifested in the paremiological units of the language, which include Proverbs and anti-Proverbs. Their use at different stages of learning a foreign language will become an additional source of background knowledge about the country of a target language and contribute to the evaluation of students’ language and speaking skills. With the help of experimental and diagnostic training, the authors are trying to prove and justify the effectiveness of using authentic proverbial material in the process of teaching a foreign language to secondary school students of the 9th grade. The analysis of empirical data has shown that indicators of socio-cultural and linguistic competence development are the abilities of students to interpret adequately background information and use a set of language tools for intercultural communication. Participants of experimental diagnostic testing objectively improved the indicators of the level of training and demonstrated the abitity to use background knowledge fluently.