Problems of teaching english at primary education

PROBLEMS OF TEACHING ENGLISH AT PRIMARY EDUCATION

Like many other subjects taught in school, the subject of the English language is one of the most relevant and demanded. The relevance of learning English is dictated by the needs of the modern world. Nowadays, the English language has become an international language of communication. The President of our country Shavkat Mirziyoyev pays special attention to this sphere, which has an important place in ensuring the future of the country and its development. In the Decree of President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev «On Uzbekistan’s development Strategy " is mentioned about achieving major improvement of in quality of general secondary education, facilitating in-depth study of foreign languages, computer science, and other important and popular disciplines [1]. Learning English at school is a complex process of forming a new speech system in the cerebral cortex, which begins to coexist and constantly interact with the already developed system of the native language. In this regard, when teaching English, we, foreign language teachers face a number of difficulties. Unreasonably designed textbooks, which on the one hand tread on the same topics, but on the other hand, are too overloaded with grammar, which is not explained at the right level, overloaded with unnecessary vocabulary for children, the tasks are too complicated, and the texts are written in far from modern language adapted for children is only a minor difficulty. Main difficulties: The first difficulty is the lack of effective and relevant motives for the mastery of the English language and the influence of the native language. From early childhood there was no need for such motives, since the child speaks his native language with which he solves all communication problems, basic vital, socio-cultural and cognitive interest, i.e. the student does not see the point in learning the language, citing the reason that he will not use it. The second difficulty is the personal psychological barriers that a part of schoolchildren experience: the uncertainty that they will be able to speak English, shyness and fear of being ridiculed because of errors in speech, fearing that undesirable evaluations will follow the mistakes made. The emergence of these barriers can contribute to frequent failure, culminating in non-stimulating, unsuspecting assessments and attitudes of the teacher of the English language. The third difficulty is the lack of systematic classes and real communication with native English speakers. There are many ways to solve these immediate problems and accordingly improve the quality of teaching a foreign language: One of the ways to improve the quality of foreign language teaching at school is an early start of education. The beginning of learning English for 6–7-year-old schoolchildren in the 1st grade of secondary school is due to the desire to use the opportunities of the age most favorable for mastering the language. Increasing the motivation of students in learning a foreign language with the help of various forms and teaching methods. Psychological barrier. In our practice, this is the most common problem. The student knows enough, he does not dare to say. Getting into a linguistic situation, it is lost, does not know where to start, it is afraid that it will not say so, and in the end it prefers to remain silent. I am convinced that the atmosphere of the class plays a very important role in solving this problem. Regularity of classes. We believe that it is necessary to increase the amount of study time devoted to learning a foreign language in the basic curriculum. Schoolchildren are deprived of the possibility of real communication, therefore it is necessary to study English every day. In this case, the main task of the school teacher is to involve, interest children to learn English. Show that it is interesting, informative and most importantly, relevant. To prove that literacy, education and comprehensive development is very important for a person at all times.

The spread of English in Uzbekistan greatly differs from that of Russian, back at the beginning of XXth century, being marked mostly as a desirable rather than suppressive process (Hasanova 2007 a, c). Uzbek people realize that English is significant in all regards when it comes to pursuing international education, attaining a good career and keeping up with the rapid pace of world changes. They greatly favour the English language, seeing it as the key to successful and prosperous life. Language specialist Rod Bolitho marks such strong interest in the language by two factors: the intention of studying and working abroad and idealisation of The UK and US. These two reasons, in his opinion, are the strongest motivations for the Uzbek to learn it. Hasanova (2007b) attributes the continuously increasing interest in the country in learning English to the international significance of the language.

Even though Hasanova (2007a) mentioned the scarcity of sources informing the language situation in the country, there are language specialists who have discussed this topic, sharing their empiric observations and experiences. West (2013) characterises English in Uzbekistan as a subject language, mostly acquired through educational training.  Bolitho predicts that English can totally supplant Russian in several decades. Duff and Dickens (2005) in their work drew attention to English teaching and the language level in rural areas in opposition to urban parts of the country. Snow, Kamhi-Stein and Brinton (2006) looked into teacher preparation experiences in the country, illustrating a unique English-medium program preparing English language teachers –IELTE (Institute of English Language Teacher Education).

The English language owns the status of foreign language in Uzbekistan (West & Sheykhametova, 2016). However, the government wants to see the language become a second language, fluently used by society, especially the younger generation. This intention of the government can easily be observed in the decree of the president (see appendix), where the role of English is highly emphasized and both education and media are called for reformation and upgrading to serve the pervasiveness of English in the country. A number of language specialists (Dearden, 2014; West, 2013) highlight the importance of the presidential decree in the increase of attention to the English language in educational establishments, which is occurring in all stages of education.

 

Projects and Government Reforms

Several large-scale projects in cooperation with British Council have been launched to achieve the purpose set by the government, including PRISETT focused on training pre-service teachers and EnSPIRe-U aimed at reforming English teaching in Higher Educational Institutions with non-linguistic majors. (West & Sheykhametova, 2016). The two projects have largely addressed the educational problems described by Duff and Dickens (2005) as well as Hasanova and Shadieva (2008). Both in-service and pre-service teacher training has become the focus of the Ministry of Education in mitigating the historically formed limited approach to language teaching and communicative development. (Hasanova, 2007a)

Since the enforcement of the decree all English language teachers have obtained a privilege of receiving a 15% (urban areas) or 30% (rural areas) bonus on top of their monthly salary, if they have reached a level of C1 in CEFR and prove this with an IELTS certificate or a certificate of language proficiency at the National Testing Centre, which was assigned to design tests to check English teacher’s language proficiency. The aim of this is primarily encouraging teachers to upgrade their language levels, which, in essence, is the principal obligation of a language teacher. Nevertheless, this policy has shown its positive impact on the quality of educational staff and has become the main criterion of employment in the country, not only in education but in other spheres as well.  This approach helped the Uzbek to understand what level must be acquired to meet the requirements of modern standards.

Continuous language training is another important consideration in the Decree. According to it, instead of starting to learn a language from the 5^th form (Hasanova, 2007a) children must now start learning English from the 1^st form of the primary school, at the age of 6-7. The Decree indicated how the language must be taught in the first year and how it should continue further. It must be noted that English has been taught even at pre-school institutions, being the only foreign language taught at this age and level (Hasanova, 2007c). Therefore, much attention has been paid to the development of appropriate programmes and textbooks in order to meet the modern world criteria and standards of teaching English to young learners.  Media started to broadcast TV shows, programmes and films in English with Uzbek subtitles to serve as additional source for the people of all ages to learn the language and hasten the growth of English in society. The streets are filled with English text, including commercial advertisements, shop names, instructions, etc.

 

New Approaches

As has been mentioned above, the main concentration has become to change the language learning from the traditional Soviet approach of grammar-translation, which was a usual method of teaching English for many years, into a communicative method, practised worldwide. The Ministry of Education with the support of The British Council and Macmillan (Hasanova 2007a, 2007c) have been creating textbooks for all stages of education incorporating state-of-art methods and techniques. Different specially-organized material designing teams are regularly trained in order to provide educational institutions with up-to-date teaching materials in addition to worldly acclaimed best-seller textbooks.

In view of educational reforms and high demand for English together with International practices in different spheres, the idea of introduction of education with English of medium of instruction started to seem feasible to the government. At present, educational establishments with English as a medium of instruction have become the most preferred institutions to study at. To meet the demand for the desire of people to be educated in English, the number of such institutions has been increasing from year to year.

These reforms have undoubtedly been aimed at integration with the Western World and acquiring information access as well as ability to keep up with the pace of changes taking place in the world. Looking back, now it becomes clear that the Uzbek government started the process of bringing the National Language closer to English “to enter the world community” (Shoumarov & Iriskulov, 2005) and communicate effectively and effortlessly on an international level (Hasanova, 2010) when it decided to convert the Uzbek alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin in 1993 (the law on Latin script adoption).

 

The Role of the Russian language

Russian, in its turn, in spite of losing its dominance still remains significant in education, government and commerce (Snow, Kamhi-Stein & Brinton, 2006). Russian language is included in the curriculum of primary, secondary and higher education and is a compulsory subject unlike the case with other foreign languages where there can be a choice. English, German or French is taught as a foreign language, as a result of which the entrance exams of many HEIs contain any of these three languages. Russian is not included in the exam as a foreign language; it is placed alongside the Uzbek language as mother tongue for those who aim to receive education with Russian as medium of instruction. Having analyzed the state laws about language use and the real language situation with languages in Uzbekistan he concludes that Russian can be called “one of the national languages of the Republic” (Djusupov, 2005).

Even though only Uzbek is declared a state language, it can be seen that the government uses Russian equally with the national language and all the documents are issued in two languages. Many local mass media organisations use Russian in broadcasting as well as written press. From my personal observation, it is possible to live in the country the whole life not knowing a word in the Uzbek language and without feeling any inconvenience in terms of communication in any circumstances. This undoubtedly is the consequence of Russian language dominance in all domains during the USSR period (Shoumarov & Iriskulov, 2005)

Usually the Russian language is usually learned by means of communication, as some part of the population uses it on a daily basis and it is not hard to find an atmosphere where one can learn spoken Russian. Therefore, it is hard to call Russian a foreign language, due to its scale of usage and widespread functioning within the country. Most educated people are bilingual in the mother tongue and Russian. Admittedly, the language is mostly used in urban areas, however, it is still understandable for people of rural areas and they can communicate in this language even though it can be on a basic level for some. No other language can be given such a characteristic in terms of functioning in the territory of the republic.