READINESS OF PRIMARY SCHOOLCHILDREN TO COMPETENCE-ORIENTED FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING: AUTHOR’S INTERPRETATION FOR THE RESULTS OF TEACHERS’ QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY

Abstract

The article analyzes the results of teachers‘ questionnaire survey, conducted by the scientific researchers of the Department Foreign Languages Teaching in the Institute of Pedagogy of NAES of Ukraine, for the purpose of ascertaining their attitude to certain issues on teaching foreign languages among pupils of 1-4 forms in general education institutions on the basis of a competence-based approach. The questionnaire survey covered eight areas of Ukraine, with more than 200 foreign language teachers working in primary schools of educational institutions. In particular, the teachers responded to the questions of pupils‘ readiness to perform simple educational activities without the teacher‘s or parent‘s help, of their possibility to learn the textbook‘s content in foreign languages without any help, etc. In addition, the teachers themselves identified the topics of ethnographic material, which, in their opinion, is advisable to familiarize pupils in the process of teaching a foreign language in primary school. Besides, the respondents expressed some wishes to the authors of foreign languages textbooks for primary school to improve their content. The results of the teachers‘ survey made it possible to identify the most significant potentialities of schoolchildren on the acquisition of competence-oriented content for teaching foreign languages, and also pointed to separate differences between teachers and authors of textbooks on various didactic and methodological approaches to determining the content of competence-oriented foreign language teaching at primary school. These results can serve as the basis for constructing a model of competence-based foreign language teaching for pupils of primary schools.