ИСТИНА

Due to the official requirements, some universities in many countries have quite an old-fashioned curriculum. Teaching is based on the grammar-translation approach, the main aim is to translate and render the text, speaking is only a negligible part of teaching. But modern students see the futility and boredom of this approach. Nevertheless, at the end of the course, they have to undergo a traditional exam; therefore the instructor cannot change the curriculum completely and concentrate on communicative tasks. Yet it could be possible to transform some tasks in order to introduce life and communication into teaching. The researcher presents some techniques of making reading, translating and retelling texts more inspiring and vivid. They include activities of finding the missing passage of an article being rendered, comprehension question quiz made by the students for each other, jeopardy game at the end of reading an extended text, peer editing of a translation, “conference interpreter” game, “guess the historic person” game and some other activities. Also, the researcher would like to share ways of learning big vocabulary lists, which is also necessary for the students. They include “swap the papers” games, miming, drawing mind-maps, bingo games, “shooting at the whiteboard” game. The researcher hopes that the experience of adjusting games and communicative tasks for the purposes of traditional curriculum could be helpful for all colleagues working under the same requirements.