TEACHING ENGLISH GRAMMAR TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: COGNITIVE APPROACH

Background: Cognitive approach to teaching foreign languages at high school proves rather effective given the level of intellectual development and interests of learners in their early youth. The approach, based on conscious learning, currently finds support in the documents on school reform being conducted in Ukraine.Purpose: The purpose of the article is to discuss provisions of cognitive approach to teaching a foreign language at high school and establish correlation between logical operations of thinking and types of syntactic exercises in the process of learning grammar.Discussion: Teaching grammar is a challenging task, especially if combined with the basic vocabulary taught parallelly. However, cognitively and thematically oriented exercises facilitate the learning process, making it more sensible and smoother. Cognitive grammar exercises also meet the learners’ expectations and develop their intellectual abilities, deepen memory, train attention and logical thinking. Besides developing their grammatical and lexical skills, the students acquire cognitive abilities to make a choice, find out necessary answers, solve problems, etc., which can be exceptionally useful in everyday life and professional setting. The proposed grammar exercises which are classified according to their types into multiple choice, transformation, comparing, grouping, logical thinking, formulation of definitions and language games can be further completed with different variations which will add additional quest to the learners.Results: The latest achievements of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology have a powerful impact on the development of new methods and approaches to language teaching. Cognitive approach to teaching foreign languages proves to be one of the most effective instruments of teaching-learning process, especially based on the knowledge of psycho-physiological development of the object of study
У статті розглядається поняття когнітивного підходу у його застосуванні у лінгводидактиці і розроблення на його засадах системи вправ для навчання учнів старших класів граматичної теми Active / Passive voice в англійській мові.