Teaching foreign languages: teacher-students interaction in the educational process.
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Teaching foreign languages: teacher-students interaction in the educational process.

Learning English is becoming more and more important nowadays. The youngsters need to communicate it in their everyday life. Speaking about music, computers as well as surfing the Internet, writing e-mails to friends abroad, playing different net games requires understanding lots of foreign words. Such demand to know English meets the variety of possibilities: evening courses, language schools, clubs etc. This is provided with great amount of Russian and foreign special literature. Different methods of teaching are presented so that one can choose the most suitable learning strategy. But still we can state that the success of learning the language depends on the main two participants of the teaching process: the teacher and the student as well as their interaction.

 We consider the teacher as the manager of the teaching process and the student as the individual the teacher is attempting to influence. Thus we find it interesting to consider the ways of their interaction to define the most successful of them.

 While reading special literature concerning management, we found very useful ideas about situational leadership. The authors Paul Hersey and Kenneth H.Blanchard developed the concept which “ is based on an interplay among (1) the amount of  guidance and direction (task behavior) a leader gives; (2) the amount of socioemotional support (relationship behavior) a leader provides; and (3) the readiness level that followers exhibit in performing a specific task, function or objective.” [P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard, 1993:184]

According to Situational Leader ship, there is no one best way to influence people, so managers need to have good diagnostic skills so that they can understand abilities and motives of the people they try to influence and managers have to adapt their leadership style to meet the demands of their environment.

Two dimensions of the readiness of people are given: ability and willingness, where ability includes knowledge, experience and skills and willingness is related to as confidence, commitment and motivation. [P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard, 1993:190]

In our opinion using these indicators will help even inexperienced teacher to understand the level of readiness of his students. The teacher can always start his lesson with the question: “Have you ever …?” The answers of his students will show how willing or motivated they are and what experience they have.

According to Situational Leadership there are four readiness levels:

1. Readiness Level One (R1)

Unable and unwilling/ insecure.

2. Readiness Level Two (R2)

Unable but willing/confident.

3. Readiness Level Three (R3)

Able but unwilling/insecure.

4. Readiness Level Four (R4)

Able and willing/confident. [P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard, 1993:191]

The next very important step is to select the appropriate  Leadership Style. After P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard there are four Leadership Styles: telling, selling, participating, delegating. [P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard, 1993:197]

For a follower or group that is at Readiness Level 1 for a specific task, it is appropriate to provide high amounts of guidance, but little supportive behavior, which means telling the followers what to do, where to do it, and how to do.

For a follower or group  that is at Readiness Level 2 the high probability style is selling which is combination of high amounts of both task and relationship behavior. It provides the opportunity for dialogue and for clarification , in order to help the person to understand what the leader wants.

 At Readiness Level 3 a person or group have shown that they are able to perform the task but they are not confident or unwilling in doing it on their own, so the leader’s major role becomes encouraging and communicating. This Leadership Style – participating – includes high amounts of two-way communication and supportive behavior, but low amounts of guidance.

 If  the individual or group is at Readiness Level 4, which means that they are ready and willing or confident, the appropriate style will be delegating, that is, little amount of relationship behavior is needed and it will be appropriate to monitor followers’ work “but it is important to give these followers an opportunity to take responsibility and implement on their own”. [P.Hersey, K.H.Blanchard, 1993:199]

We think that teacher’s work will be more effective if s/he puts into practice stated above concepts of Situational Leadership. Having defined that the students are at Readiness Level 1, the teacher will use Leadership Style 1, that is,  if the students have little experience and motivation to do the task the teacher have to organize their work, to set the goal, to set time lines, to direct their work and to control the results of their work.

If the teacher has defined that the students are at Readiness Level 2 he uses Leadership Style 2. It means that the students have low abilities but they are motivated   and willing to perform their work so the teacher will direct their work but explain decisions and provide feedback to support their motivation.

If the students are at Readiness Level 3 it will be appropriate to use Leadership Style 3: the students are able but they are not confident in doing their task on their own or their motivation is getting worse, the teacher will use little guidance but provide support and encouragement to build their confidence and self-esteem, facilitate students’ interaction, provide feedback on students’ accomplishments.

If the students are at readiness Level 4 which means that they are able and confident or motivated in doing the task on their own, the teacher will use Leadership Style 4 delegating responsibility for decisions and implementation of the task to the students, providing little support and controlling results.

According to Situational Leadership using the appropriate Leadership Style helps even develop followers’ readiness. The manager can reduce slowly the amount of task behavior delegating more responsibility to followers and increase relationship behavior to reinforce positive change. We find it very useful as one of the main teacher’s goals is to develop students’ abilities and motivation to such a high level when s/he starts to learn on their own, finding the necessary information and being self-motivated.

Implementing the concepts of Situational Leadership in our work helped us to improve teacher-student interaction, develop students’ abilities and motivation and obtain good results in teaching languages.