Methodology as a scholarly discipline refers to pedagogic study and with respect to pedagogy is a special didactics, that is a theory of teaching a concrete educational subject. As far as the discipline “a foreign language” is concerned, methodology is a scholarship of laws and rules of language teaching, ways of acquiring language knowledge and skills.
A more detailed definition of methodology as a scholarly discipline is: it is a scholarship studying the objectives, contents, means, methods, organizational forms of teaching a foreign language, acquainting with the culture of a foreign language country as well as with ways of teaching, upbringing and acquisition of a language in the process of learning it.
Both in the first and the second more detailed definition we deal with three basic notions forming the essence of the contents of the term methodology: language teaching, acquisition and skill.
Teaching is joint activities of a teacher and learners in the course of which a person’s development, education and upbringing are realized. At foreign language classes teaching is carried out in the course of a teacher’s transmission of his or her foreign language experience to the learners, as a result of which they acquire this speech experience and gain language skills, that is, use a language as a means of intercourse in different situations of its application. knowledge, speech habits and abilities, being acquired in the course of teaching, constitute the basis of such language skills. They also comprise every learner’s communicative competence.
In the process of a foreign language acquisition learners use different learning strategies, that is, different ways of obtaining, processing and applying of information.
In methodology there are different points of view on methodology as a scholarly discipline.
1. Methodology is not an independent scholarly discipline, it is guided by linguistic data, and is part of applied linguistics. This point of view belongs to the academician Leo Shcherba (1880-1944), an outstanding linguist as well as a methodist, and was theoretically substantiated in his book “Foreign Language Teaching in Secondary School. General Problems of Methodology” (1947). Leo Shcherba stated that as a linguist-theoretician he found it possible to substantiate the theory of a foreign language teaching proceeding from the analysis of the notion language in its various aspects. This point of view had many supporters in the 1940-1950s and was further developed in the works of I.V.Rakhmanov, V.D.Arakin, O.S.Akhmanova, L.Bloomfield and other well-known scholars.
2. Methodology is an applied field of psychology. The psychologist’s task involves helping methodists to scholarly elaborate basic methods of language teaching and investigate individual-psychological peculiarities of language learners. This point of view belongs to a well-known psychologist B.V.Belayev, who worked out the conception of conscious-practical method in his book “Essays on Psychology of Foreign Language Teaching” (1965). The method still remains one of the basic ones in teaching non-native languages. The supporters of this point of view were V.A.Artyomov, B.A.Benediktov and G.V.Karpov.
3. Methodology is a branch of pedagogy (special didactics) and is guided by didactic principles, elaborated in this field of knowledge. This point of view, theoretically substantiated in the works of well-known didacticians and methodists (Y.K.Babansky, A.V.Tekuchev, V.S.Tsetlin, E.P.Shubin), existed up to the 1960s, the time of becoming methodology an independent branch of knowledge.
Modern point of view on methodology as the theory of foreign language teaching is reduced to the statement that methodology is an independent study, guided by the data of other disciplines the basic of which being linguistics, pedagogy, psychology, sociology and culturology.
Among the arguments in favour of this statement one may consider the following:
1. Methodology has its own subject-matter of teaching. This is a foreign language, being simultaneously an objective and a means of teaching. Being an objective of teaching, language acquisition allows learners to get acquainted with its system and the ways of its use in practical and research activities. Being a means of teaching, a language gives the possibility of eliciting information from foreign texts and writing one’s own texts depending on the emerging needs.
2. Methodology has its own conceptual apparatus - metalanguage that is the system of terms, reflecting the contents of this branch of knowledge.
3. Methodology has its own object of investigation. This is the process of language teaching.
4. Methodology has its own subject-matter of investigation – this is the totality of knowledge, accumulated during the existence of methodology as a scholarship, about its object in the form of various theories in teaching, methodic recommendations about the process, methods and resources of teaching and ways of increasing their effectiveness.
