Innovation in Language Learning

Being an object of pragmatic approach fiction offers great opportunities for teaching a foreign language. Fiction presents a number of language styles, so learners can produce their own oral and/or written speech by means of language models they obtain while reading. Fiction encourages them to plunge into a socio-cultural context of the language they learn. Thus, learning the language of a certain country and obtaining its culture are becoming simultaneous and indispensable. Besides, reading fiction has always been interesting. Such an important criterion as interest stimulates a learner to, first, reading and understanding and later – to speechmaking, discussing, arguing and debating.

Fiction, however, presents considerable difficulties for a foreign student as it contains a variety of unknown lexical, grammatical and/or syntactical units, alongside with a number of cultural phenomena.

We suggest original fiction alongside with its parallel translation into students’ native language (it might also be English as an international “mediator”). Reading parallel texts makes it easy to read and understand the meaning of what has been read. Such reading removes psychological barriers, which are obvious when students read foreign fiction. What is even more important, fiction presented in parallel texts is not adapted or abridged. In other words, it is not simplified and thus corresponds to the students’ intellectual level.

Having parallel texts in front of them students do not have to translate from the language of the original into their native language: they have all the language forms at their disposal and can reproduce them in their oral speech while answering the teacher’s questions aimed at checking comprehension. Thus, involving the students into a foreign language communication becomes natural and omits such a time-consuming stage as translation.

There is no doubt that fiction presented with a parallel translation needs to be provided with the teacher’s comments which more often than not concern historic and cultural realms, idioms, metaphors, phraseology, slang, etc. Obtaining them students begin using them in their speech reducing and compensating an obvious lag of their mental and analytical processes in case of translating on their own.