Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan

2.2.Videoconferencing is the one of developing speaking skills
The rapid expansion of technological tools in recent years has been transferring foreign language teaching onto a completely new level. Considering the limited opportunities both for interaction outside the classroom and for the development of learners’ communicative competence, new technologies, especially new capabilities for audio and video communication that have emerged lately in educational contexts are particularly useful for successful achievement of language learning objectives.
It has been widely agreed that pursuing authentic communicative goals allows learners to develop communicative competence. The concept of communicative competence has itself been long discussed in literature. The prevailing model (cf. Bagarić and Djigunović 2007), first proposed by Canale and Swain (1980, 1981), was based on three main areas of knowledge and skills: grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence, with a fourth component, discourse competence, added by Canale (1983, 1984) some time later. While grammatical competence is mainly concerned with mastery of the linguistic code needed for understanding and expressing the literal meanings of utterances, sociolinguistic competence involves appropriateness of language use in different sociolinguistic and sociocultural contexts. Strategic competence, on the other hand, is connected with the use of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that help learners deal successfully with any gaps in communicative competence. Finally, discourse competence, as described by Canale (1983, 1984), involves the mastery of rules that determine cohesion and coherence of both spoken and written texts. Thus, well-designed tasks need to focus on communication that provides an opportunity to use linguistic elements correctly, but also to express oneself appropriately within social contexts (Swain 2000).
Oral interaction has long been considered an important element in the field of second language acquisition, and it has been widely agreed that speaking skills develop best in an authentic situation that involves negotiation of meaning (Long 1996). However, interactional modifications that contribute to making input more comprehensible alone do not appear sufficient to focus learners on the differences between their interlanguage and target language forms and still need to be accompanied by two additional factors involved in interaction and acquisition: the interaction hypothesis, means that negotiated interaction, in which corrective adjustments are made by native speakers or experts who are more competent than learners, reveals gaps in learners’ interlanguage. Furthermore, it leads to the modification of their output in the L2, and thus its adaptation to the negotiated form, which facilitates acquisition.
Yet the benefits of interacting in the L2 mentioned above have mainly been shown for the traditional NS–NNS configuration (Long 1996). The way learners interact among themselves is different from the way learners and native speakers interact, which is why the model for negotiation of meaning among L2 learners described by Varonis and Gass (1985) may be perhaps more suitable for identifying and analyzing the negotiation routines in the case of the videoconferenced oral interviews between foreign language learners. In their model for negotiation of meaning, Varonis and Gass (1985) claim that the horizontal flow of conversation is interrupted when an acknowledgement of the communication problem (the indicator) occurs following the source of non-understanding (the trigger), and it is continued until the negotiation for meaning ends, either with a positive or negative outcome. Then, the conversation is resumed and the main line of discourse is continued.
The term videoconferencing is used to describe a system where two or more participants in different locations can interact while both seeing and hearing each other in real time with the help of specialized equipment and a high-speed Internet connection (Smith 2003). As the quality of online transmission has been continually improving and the cost of computer equipment falling, videoconferencing is becoming more and more accessible nowadays, especially in the field of distance learning. There are a growing number of studies that have discussed the practices and obstacles to effective teaching and learning focusing on the educational uses of videoconferencing, both in schools and in higher education (Coventry 1998; Martin 2000; Newman et al. 2008; Lawson et al. 2010).
It is important to mention that while being situated within the e-learning context, videoconferencing significantly differs from text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), as it allows for audiovisual channels in the interaction. As a result, videoconferencing retains key elements of the communication process, such as the reception of non-verbal signals that support the interaction, and, most importantly, the immediacy and spontaneity of response, creating time pressure on the participants to process input and provide output in real time (Lee 2007).
The audiovisual channel of communication and time pressure which entail the need for an immediate response definitely put the videoconferencing context very close to a real-life authentic situation.⁹ Such a claim seems to be supported by a recent study by Kim and Craig (2012) in which experimental tests were carried out with test-takers using face-to-face and videoconferenced oral interviews. The findings indicated no significant differences in performance between the two test modes and also provided evidence for the comparability of the videoconferenced and face-to-face interviews in terms of comfort, computer familiarity, environment, non-verbal linguistic cues, interests, speaking opportunity, and topic effects. In another study, Yanguas (2010), while examining task-based, synchronous oral computer-mediated communication (CMC) among intermediate-level learners of Spanish, found no significant differences in the way video and traditional face-toface communication groups carried out these negotiations.
In the light of such considerations, it is hardly surprising that videoconferencing has been making an important contribution to the language learning field, especially as a means of communicating orally with expert/native speakers and as a means of enhancing the development of learners’ oral skills (McAndrew et al. 1996; O’Dowd 2000; Chapelle 2001; Wang 2006; Lee 2007; Katz 2001; Kinginger and Belz 2005; Ware and Kramsch 2005; Wiedemann 2006; Guichon, 2010; Bower and Kawaguchi 2011; Kim and Craig 2012).
There are a number of scholars linking videoconferenced interactions that aim at fostering foreign language speaking skills with issues of self-confidence, anxiety and communication apprehension. For example, Kinginger (1998) analyzed classroom interactions taking place between language learners in the US and France via international videoconferencing. The research project aimed at identifying the morphosyntactic and discourse difficulties experienced by American second language learners interacting with native speakers of French. She found that much of the language use that took place during the conference was beyond these learners’ capabilities, due in part to heightened language classroom anxiety, and in part to differences between the variety of French learned in American schools and the French spoken by educated native speakers. In a particularly useful study, Phillips (2010) investigated the development of L2 oral production among young learners and her findings suggest that pupils of both lower and higher abilities tended to see videoconferencing as helpful in learning to speak French; good students were highly motivated by their videoconferencing participation and lower ability students benefitted with increased confidence in speaking.