ROLES OF MANUALS IN TEACHING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AND LEXIS OF FUTURE EFL TEACHERS

Abstract

The article explicates the significance of the use of educators’ practical manuals for teaching English pronunciation and lexis at higher education. It proves that manuals help to adapt the main information from the course books according to the needs and abilities of future EFL teachers. It appears to be the fact that manuals support and complement educators and their ways of teaching. It reveals that cognitive, emotional and volitional abilities of every student with his individual characteristics should be taken into account when choosing and organizing exercises. It points out that teaching aids and manuals can be considered a remarkable complement to the main literature of the compulsory English practical courses at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Uman State Pedagogical University. The article also reveals possible types of lexical and pronunciation practice activities and tasks at higher education. The analysis of the activities was conducted on the basis of compulsory practical English courses at Faculty of Foreign Languages of Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University. It depicts that most of the analysed activities and tasks can be divided into groups due to the development of productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading) skills. It points out that lexis and pronunciation are the main bases of any communication. The study claims about the advantages and disadvantages of teaching manuals. It examines the most commonly used tasks for teaching pronunciation and lexis. The article indicates that there is the difficulty to differentiate between the exercises and tasks to study vocabulary and grammar. Nowadays, studying a word as only the unit or phrase is not enough. The main goal of teaching lexis is an “internal study” of the meaning of words, some set expressions and words combinations, which can be easily recalled and quickly used without thinking of the necessity to make up new expressions or sentences, while remembering all the grammatical rules in every sentence. Nevertheless, lexis does not comprise only the information on the use of the essential vocabulary; the grammar aspects of language should be taken into account. It concludes that that an important advantage of most manuals is contextualization. The other area of manuals advantage is individual needs. Personalisation is the other pro of manuals. All in all, manuals help to avoid the commonplace that one book can fit all learners. The article also distinguishes some manuals’ pitfalls for educators. First of all, all of the analysed manuals do not reflect the clear learners achievements and progression. Yet, the educators are limited in time.