Teaching speaking a second foreign language to students majoring in linguistics

The paper deals with the problem of teaching speaking a second foreign language. The emphasis is put on the fact that two foreign languages are studied in many liberal fields of education, including linguistics. However, observations show that students’ proficiency in a second foreign language is zero or significantly lower than in the first one. In the theoretical part of the paper the authors consider the development of foreign language speaking skills in the context of communicative activity approach. This approach implies that the main goal of foreign language learning is the mastery of all kinds of language activities (reading, listening, writing, and speaking). At the same time the development of lexical, grammatical, phonetic and other skills facilitate. The main phases of the speaking process are listed and the close interaction between speaking and listening is highlighted. The practical part of the paper is devoted to describing exercises to develop the skills of preparing a dialogue on the topic under study. At the first stage of training the authors suggest practicing individual situations in the form of micro-dialogs. At the second stage, students perform an audio script and then memorize the resulting text. The final stage of preparation is the reproduction of the whole dialogue using speech supports.