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1PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
ANENT PHILOLOGICAL EDUCATION AT SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN RUSSIA
Voskresenskaia L.
candidat of science, associated professor, teacher in Slipchenko Volgograd Cadet School
Abstract
Learning a foreign language facilitates the process of penetrating into the own native language. The results of the research under consideration show the necessity of developing a special program for senior school students in order to make them create a wider linguistic world image which can result in sophisticating their linguistic competence both in native and foreign languages.
Keywords: linguistic world image, reverse interference, linguistic competence, verbal behavior.
Learning a foreign language is a compulsory school subject in Russia. In accordance with the Federal Educational Standards, a student must acquire the knowledge of a foreign language as early as at the primary level and then master the language skills. Thereby the conscious of a junior schoolchild and adolescent becomes more sophisticated due to increasing the number of sign systems to be acquired. Evidently, these systems affect each other in the process of learning. In linguistics, it is called interference, and this phenomenon often becomes a matter for scientific research (E.M. Veresh-chagin, U. Weinreich, L.A. Verbitskaia, A.E. Karlin-skii, I.I. Khaleeva, etc.) The research of language interference commonly deals with the study of the impact produced by the mother tongue on the learning of a foreign language. The effect is considered negative in the main.
However, it can be logically assumed, that a foreign language would exercise a certain influence over a student's linguistic competence in the field of the mother tongue. This phenomenon was studied in research of the American linguists (U. Weinreich, I. Kecskes, V. Cook, A. Pavlenko), but in Russia it is less scrutinized and mainly represented by the papers studying borrowings in the Russian language (M.M. Sizov). Thus, insufficient study of changing the mother tongue linguistic competence and verbal behavior due to learning a foreign one determined the relevance of our research.
In the paper under consideration, we regard linguistic competence as a mother tongue knowledge system and the ability to assess linguistic phenomena in accordance with the acquired rules.
The linguistic competence reveals in the human verbal activity. The latter obtains social feature as verbal discourse is formed within it and aims at a certain purpose in communication. L.S. Vygotskii is known to characterize verbal activity as the process of a thought materializing, i.e. the transformation into a word.
Thus, the linguistic competence and the verbal activity, in other words knowledge and the experience of its practical use, can be regarded as an integrated sign system, which is formed and develops in the mind of a student in compliance with his/her linguistic abilities and learning motivation as provided by curricula of different levels.
At Russian schools, the English language is often chosen as the foreign language to study by the students or, as a matter of fact, by their parents. It occurs according to the contemporary geopolitical situation. At the primary level when the gaming prevails as a method of teaching, students take a positive attitude to the foreign language. However, at the senior levels the subject becomes more difficult, and the students' attitude changes.
As noted by many authors (U. Weinreich, A.S. Krutoberezhskaia, Y.V. Soldatova, P.V. Timachev, I.I. Khaleeva), when an individual, whose world image is formed by the mother tongue, encounters the double difficulty. On the one hand, his linguistic consciousness opposes the other language system which often leads to loan translation (calquing) from the native language. On the other hand, his cognitive consciousness fails to accept the idea that another language conveys the reality with other words and grammar structures. Thereby, the linguistic world image alters and learning of a foreign language influences the contents of a human mind. The further mastering the subject needs to apply comparative method and the phenomenon of interference becomes more evident. In teaching the English language, it is necessary to analyze international words and to explain in Russian such syntactic structures as compound object and compound subject. The process of purposeful analysis and comparison is able to decrease the negative interference and result in forming some new understanding of native language. We call it reverse interference. We are of the opinion that it should be one of the objectives of the education in the field of Philology at a senior secondary school. The effect of this process can be positive for personal development of a young man. As Istvan Kecskes stated, "people who know more than one language have different knowledge of their first language L1 than do monolingual people, and this difference can be due to the effect of subsequent languages on the development and use of L1 skills" [2, p. ix]
We have to admit the lack of the specific program for philological education capable to realize interdisciplinary approach at a secondary school. The importance of such program is profound because our research shows that we cannot neglect the phenomenon of reverse interference.
We studied the process of reverse interference at the level of linguistic competence and verbal behavior of senior students in our city of Volgograd (Russia). The survey was developed to reveal the reverse interference among Russian students, to analyze the influence of the English language on the Russian language competence and verbal behavior in everyday communication of Russian young people.
The survey consisted of two parts. The first one contained questions exposing the degree of the influence that imposes the English language on the Russian language competence. The testees were offered the following questions:
"Do I think about the Russian language when I learn English? Specifically, that
1. Sentences in Russian are constructed according to the different rules.
2. There are similar words in both languages with similar meaning.
3. The exceptions in some parts of speech formation are often the same.
4. Many terms used in Russian are English neutral words."
The students were asked to give examples if they answered the question positively.
The second part of the survey contained questions concerning the influence of the English language on the verbal behavior of the young people in the situation of everyday communication.
"Do I use English words instead of Russian ones in the following situations:
1. when I talk on the Internet where English abbreviations are used;
2. when I speak to friends and want to demonstrate a higher level of education;
3. when my friends and I use English words as slang;
4. when an English word is more capacious in meaning that its Russian equivalent?"
The students were also asked to give examples.
The survey was organized at Slipchenko Volgograd Cadet School where English is taught at the basic level and at Gymnasium #13 with the advanced level of training English. The results obtained in the research witness that the majority of students think about the peculiarities of their mother tongue while learning English in spite of the fact that neither curriculum has a specific section for analysis of the languages. The least percentage of positive answers has the question about the similarity in morphological exceptions. For example, первый, второй - in Russian, first, second -in English; ребенок - дети - in Russian, child-children -
in English. The possible conclusion is that this point was out of discussion at both schools. A considerable part of students realizes that many terms originated from English words.
Thus, learning the English language facilitates the process of penetrating into the own native language. However, it should be admitted that this process has spontaneous nature at both schools. The data from these two samples illustrate that students from Gymnasia have better results which leads to conclusion that advanced program provides a more profound reverse interference despite its spontaneous character.
The analysis of the answers from the second part of the survey shows that using of English words in everyday life often pollutes the native speech. It should be regarded as a negative fact.
The results of the fulfilled research persuaded us of the necessity to develop a special program for senior school students in order to make them create a wider linguistic world image which can result in sophisticating linguistic competence both in native and foreign languages.
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