Antonina Shushkivska, "Assistant practice enriches everyone with valuable experience"

Is it possible to combine reading Vogue articles, analyzing TikTok videos, interesting interactive tasks, and learning French? Of course! Learning languages has long gone beyond working with a single textbook, and can and should also be fun.

   My name is Tonya and for three weeks as part of my teaching practice, I worked with students and taught French.

   I myself speak three foreign languages and know how boring it can be to get together and open a textbook, so I often looked for alternative ways to learn foreign languages: watching movies, reading books and articles, searching for interesting videos from foreign bloggers. That is why when developing lesson plans, I tried to fill the couple with the most diverse and interesting tasks that are relevant to the topic.
   For example, during classes on the topic "La Mode – fashion", I prepared an adapted article for the level about tattoos, from which we examined unknown vocabulary, and then performed tests for reading comprehension. Next, we watched a video on a similar topic: "10 things you should know before getting a tattoo". Throughout, students can be asked about the translation of individual words/phrases/sentences, ask random questions in French, ask their opinion, experience, and so on. Thus, not only lexical competencies are worked out, but also speaking skills are improved – which is the most important thing when learning languages – the ability to speak fluently and without barriers.

  Learning languages can and should be fun and up-to-date, even if it's about studying at a university. Therefore, during classes, I often developed interesting tasks: listen to a song and insert the missing words in the lyric, read annotations and quotes from books, watch videos or Tik Tok and then complete tasks (for example, say a translation or choose from the suggested answers what was discussed in the video and what was not), brainstorm (when a question is given, and everyone should express their opinion).
   I chose this approach to work, because the topic of my master's thesis is related to communications, so I was interested to make an observation of how using the communicative method of teaching you can teach and learn a foreign language – spoiler alert: it is much more interesting, modern and helps to constantly keep students included and interested.
  Thanks to this approach, there is always a friendly atmosphere in the classroom, there is a constant and simultaneous involvement of all students, students use the previously acquired knowledge and experience, since the range of topics discussed is wide and covers various areas of everyday life. As a result: students and eventually couples remain active and lively, and the couple itself passes quickly and productively. This practice helped me to understand the process of implementing some theoretical points and consolidate practical skills in the course of work, namely: analyzing educational programs for teaching a foreign language, drawing up plans and selecting educational materials for conducting classes, developing my own interactive tasks, improving the communicative component of teaching activities.