Study the excercises 1.2. and work out a similar complex of exercises aimed to acquire useful vocabulary from this text.

Think and speak about the principles which determined your choice of vocabulary to process.

Translate and Render 1.3.

 

Британские университеты могут "сдать мировые позиции"

В течение следующих 10 лет Великобритания может утратить свою репутацию мирового лидера в области университетского образования, предупредила вчера заместитель ректора Кембриджа.

Стандарты образования резко упадут, если университеты не будут противостоять соблазну принимать на учебу недостаточно талантливых студентов в попытке заткнуть дыры в финансировании, заявила профессор Элисон Ричард представителям британского парламента.

В настоящий момент Кембридж и Оксфорд занимают второе и третье места соответственно в мировом рейтинге университетов, пропуская вперед лишь Гарвард. 29 британских университетов входят в число лучших 200, и страна завоевала мировой авторитет благодаря высокому уровню высшего образования.

Профессор Ричард сообщила спецкомитету по образованию, что стремление правительства увеличить число студентов может нанести серьезный урон стандартам образования.

В частности, тенденция принимать иностранных студентов, которые платят более крупные суммы за обучение, может привести к "порочному кругу", заявила она.

Министры постановили приложить усилия к тому, чтобы к 2010 году 50% всех 18-30-летних людей получали высшее образование.

Профессор Ричард, ранее ректор Йельского университета, указала: "Вероятно, у нас есть около 10 лет на то, чтобы консолидировать и сориентировать систему так, чтобы она восстановила свою конкурентоспособность. Риск для британской системы, по моему мнению, заключается в том, что из-за исторического недофинансирования нашей деятельности в области образования появится соблазн сделать упор на объемах вместо качества".

Она призвала к росту инвестиций в университеты и со стороны государства, и со стороны частных спонсоров.

Жизненно важно, чтобы в университеты приходили студенты из всех слоев общества. Кембридж не должен стать "попрост у пансионом для богачей".

 

Listen and Discuss 1.3.

 

Listen and complete these sentences taken from another VOA report “With College Endowments, How Much Is Too Much?”

1) An endowment is money from______________________________________

__________________________________

2) Colleges use endowment money for student _______ and ___________ improvements, and for financial _________________.

3) But college costs in the United States have been rising faster _____________

__________________________

4) Critics say schools with a lot of money should be___________________ more of their wealth to ______________________________________for families

5) They say the pressure to help ______________________________families might mean ____________________________for poor students.

6) Colleges and their endowments are__________________________________

______________________

7) Other ______________________________ groups are required to spend at least ________________________of their endowments each year.

8) Lynn Munson says universities pay out only about ________________of their endowments

9) Some experts say most endowment money has to remain ___________so schools are not hurt when markets_____________.

10) Universities point out that donors often ____________________________for their donations

Speak about similarities and differences of challenges faced by the British and American Education

 

Programme 3 - 'Content and Language Integrated Learning' (CLIL) - Part 1
Duration 13 minutes 46 seconds

Now we turn to Europe and focus on methodology, for an increasingly popular way of putting content and language learning together. Find out how learning about Rockets and Robots in Germany, and teaching Biology in Bulgaria are changing the way we teach English!

For more information and ideas about cross-curriculum teaching try these websites: http://www.factworld.info/ (the Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching) and http://www.scienceacross.org/ (the Science Across the World site)

Discuss and Write1.3.

Read the abstracts devoted to Cognitive and Humanistic approaches in teaching foreign languages. Choose one of them and justify its application in practice. Write an essay of 300 words.

Cognitive Theories

The cognitive school is probably best defined by exclusion: if it ain't biological, behaviourist or humanist, it's cognitive (I'm including information-processing models here).

• It all starts with Gestalt theories [Köhler and Koffka, and with only the vaguest connection with Gestalt therapy (Perls)]: originally theories of perception, interested in the way the brain imposes pattern on the perceived world, Gestalt moved into problem-solving learning.

• It is also much influenced by the developmental psychology of Piaget (but also read Donaldson (1984) if reading Piaget), focusing on the maturational factors affecting understanding. The accommodation/assimilation dialectic is the part most useful for understanding grown learners.

• Broadly, cognitive theory is interested in how people understand material, and thus in;
• aptitude and capacity to learn (thus fringing onto psychometrics and testing),
• and learning styles.

It is also the basis of the educational approach known as constructivism, which emphasises the role of the learner in constructing his own view or model of the material, and what helps with that.

Humanistic Theory

Humanistic "theories" of learning tend to be highly value-driven and hence more like pre scriptions (about what ought to happen) rather than de scriptions (of what does happen).

• They emphasise the "natural desire" of everyone to learn. Whether this natural desire is to learn whatever it is you are teaching, however, is not clear.
• It follows from this, they maintain, that learners need to be empowered and to have control over the learning process.
• So the teacher relinquishes a great deal of authority and becomes a facilitator.

The school is particularly associated with

• Carl Rogers, and
• Abraham Maslow (psychologists),
• John Holt (child education) and
• Malcolm Knowles (adult education and proponent of andragogy). Insofar as he emphasises experiential learning, one could also include
• Kolb among the humanists as well as the cognitive theorists.

While the tenor of humanistic theory is generally wishy-washy liberal, its approach also underlies the more committed stance of “transformative learning” (Mezirow) and “conscientization” (Freire).

My heart is with humanistic theory, but I sometimes find it hard to make connections with the reality of routine practice. Its most fertile ground is with intrinsically motivated adult learners. It is not as potent now as it was in the '70s, when it often seemed to be used as an excuse for the abrogation of the realistic authority of the teacher—or perhaps we have just become more mature in our use of it. As the politicised variants show, it poses considerable challenges not only to approaches to teaching, but also to the construction of the curriculum as a whole. As society has become more fragmented and "post-modern", these challenges have become even more problematic.

(Atherton J S (2005) Learning and Teaching: Cognitive theories of learning.//Humanistic approaches to learning)