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Личность и медиа: гуманитарное исследование в медиаобразовании Богданова Светлана Юрьевна
Доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры прикладной лингвистики ФГБОУ ВПО «ИГЛУ», г. Иркутск, Россия
УДК 372.881.1 ББК 83
РОЛЬ ЧТЕНИЯ В ОВЛАДЕНИИ ИНОСТРАННЫМ ЯЗЫКОМ
Внушительный объем информации, поступающий к обучающимся по разным каналам, часто не оставляет места для чтения художественной литературы на изучаемом языке. Между тем, не овладев цитатным фондом, не освоив текстовое поле языка, вне языковой среды и в условиях отсутствия повседневного общения на данном языке невозможно сформировать иноязычную языковую компетенцию. В статье обосновывается необходимость чтения художественной литературы на изучаемом языке.
Ключевые слова: языковая компетенция; цитатный фонд; текстовое поле; коммуникативный фрагмент.
THE ROLE OF EXTENSIVE READING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
The paper deals with the language proficiency level of the Russian students, which gives rise to concern. The sufficient amount of information which comes through different channels leaves little time for reading fiction in the language they learn. The necessity of reading fiction for acquisition of the citatory fund and mastering the textual field of the language has been justified.
Key words: language competence; language proficiency; citatory fund; textual field; communicative fragment.
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
R. Bradbury
According to Boris Gasparov, when it is stated that a person 'has acquired' the language, it only means that the person manages to exist in the language as in the environment, to act in this environment, and to interact with it (rather) successfully [1]. Linguistic competence defines the system of rules that governs an individual's tacit understanding of what is acceptable and what is not in the language. It includes the following characteristics: the ability to choose linguistic units according to the speech situation and the addressee, as well as the ability to interpret correctly the received utterances. Interpretation suggests the ability to understand implications, metaphors, obvious and hidden quotations, see the symbols. The term 'linguistic competence' was introduced by N. Chomsky. By this term he meant the speaker-internal intuitive linguistic competence of the native speaker. Later on Robert Lees and Edward Klima [2] restricted their data observations to their own dialect only, which means that they admitted the linguistic competence of the speaker of a certain dialect. Klima [3] was one of the first to note the occasional indeterminacy of intuitive data, and to resolve it by postulating two different idiolects A and B, i.e. by going one step further [4]. Consequently, we can surmise that hence he proclaimed the linguistic competence of the speaker of a certain idiolect, which narrowed the meaning of the term.
However, nowadays in the Russian literature on Teaching Methods the term 'linguistic competence' is used in a broader sense, it can also describe the same abilities in the sphere of foreign language [5]. It is much more difficult to 'acquire' the foreign language, or to get the linguistic competence in this sphere, if the foreign language is taught outside the natural language environment and without everyday contacts with the native speakers of this language. Nevertheless, the traditional Russian system of foreign language teaching was quite effective. During Soviet decades the only possibility to learn a foreign language was by reading textbooks, doing tasks, translating from the foreign language into Russian and back, listening to the teacher and to a limited number of tapes. However, the results of such learning were quite satisfactory, and foreigners were often surprised at the fact that the foreign language can be mastered without studying it in the country where it is spoken. (The latter is obligatory for the students who study foreign languages professionally in many European countries, for example, for the 3rd year students at Oxford University.)
What was the secret of foreign language acquisition, which meant not only mastering grammar and spelling but also understanding (even if not complete) implications, allusions, metaphors? The reason for it seems to have been the compulsory extensive reading of fiction in the foreign language during the years of studying. I want to stress the word 'fiction' here. It goes without saying that the language lives in all registers and obeys the same specific laws. Why is it not very effective to read only modern magazines, Internet-style novels, as well as scientific articles and popular lore to get the linguistic competence? The purpose of today's presentation
is to show the role of extensive reading in the development of the linguistic competence in the sphere of foreign language.
Boris Gasparov states that when we produce our own utterances in our native language we often use not just separate words but 'communicative fragments' [1]. They exist in our minds in the form of blocks taken from the utterances which we have once heard or read. It's rather hard to remember exactly where this or that certain communicative fragment had been taken from, but the memories of it live in our minds and 'emerge' when necessary. Gasparov's argumentation is like this: (I quote)
'Let's consider in detail how the particles of the linguistic material live in the sphere of their potential usage. For our example I have chosen - absolutely arbitrarily - the form of one of the objective cases of one of the Russian nouns, namely the word form рук.
For a person with a good command of Russian the word form рук does not exist as the genitive case plural number of the word рука, but as a stretch of the linguistic material, which reminds him of the vast fields of definite expressions living in his linguistic experience. Here are some expressions which include this word form and live in my mind:
[это] дело его/твоих рук! - полюбуйся на дело своих рук! [совсем/окончательно/вконец] отбился от рук
не хватает рабочих рук - [острая] нехватка рабочих рук <...>' [1, с. 86]. (end of the quotation)
Thus, this word form, like many others, is a part of the large field of potential expressions. Gasparov believes that the more expressions are settled in the speaker's mind, the wider are the circles of the potential expressions which can be produced on the analogy of those ones already known to the speaker [1, с. 87]. The multiplicity of the net of associative courses depends mainly on the speaker's linguistic experience, and consequently on the contents of his or her 'citatory fund' «цитатный фонд». It means that the level of language acquisition depends on the way how this citatory fund was compiled. I am sure that here lies the answer to the question why it is necessary to read extensively quality fiction taking away the excuses that all the time goes into reading scientific articles, textbooks, newspapers and magazines. These types of reading are not equivalent from the point of view of developing linguistic competence.
In the middle of the twentieth century George Orwell, talking about the English language, pointed out that the political dialects are 'all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech'. There are a lot of dying metaphors (fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day), operators or verbal false limbs (give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of), pretentious diction (unforgettable, triumphant, inevitable), and meaningless words (sentimental, natural, vitality) [6]. The same expressions can be found in the modern Russian political discourse so often that we treat them as officialeses or clichés. Consequently, if we read predominantly newspapers and magazines, we fill in our 'citatory fund' with rather poor and monotonous vocabulary.
The replenishment of the citatory fund by means of reading fiction gives us quite a different result because novels, stories and poems are enriched by fresh vivid metaphors which, in Orwell's words, call up visual images. Reading fiction we get acquainted with the worldview reflected in the mind of another person, and it leads to the comparison of our own and represented by the author worldviews giving an impulse to the development of our cognitive abilities. This thought is brilliantly reflected by John Kieran who said, 'I am a part of everything that I have read' [7].
In the process of foreign language acquisition it is even more important to replenish the citatory fund, because in the beginning of the studies the meshes of the net of associative courses are very large. The smaller the meshes, the quicker and more successful becomes the speaker's ability to catch the linguistic particles with its help and to adjust them in order to form the complete utterance from them.
Reading is viewed by scholars as a complex mix of decoding skills, cognitive processes, and social experiences. Extensive reading is aimed at overcoming the limits in the real language experience. Shades of meanings, nuances are only possible to discern through a wide context. Besides, some researchers say one needs to come across the word seventeen times before he/she remembers it. Textbooks focus on introducing new language but not on the amount of repetition necessary for acquisition, whereas books recycle words and grammar which would give the learner an opportunity to consolidate the language. So, the importance of reading fiction is obvious because it can introduce the enumerable contexts for the newly learnt words as well as the unknown linguistic worldview on top of the worldview represented by the author. One of the conditions of extensive reading is that the vocabulary should be a little above the student's level. This agrees with one of the two conditions suggested by Alexander Kravchenko for the linguistic environment in foreign language acquisition. He writes, 'The linguistic environment should b e-come constantly and permanently more complicated' [8, c. 265]. The second condition is the diversity of the linguistic environment. If these two conditions are observed, the linguistic competence will keep growing [ibid.].
However, in the more open society with the Internet access and international travelling the importance of extensive reading is obviously underestimated in Russia by the majority of students and, regretfully, by some university teachers. More and more often they refuse to organize home reading classes on the ground of a great amount of large texts in modern textbooks. Thus, nowadays we can observe the substitution of bright quality fiction with vivid images by the texts of mainly mass media discourse. It fills in the students' minds with the communicative fragments of a certain type, and in the future this substitution can lead to the situation that the students' linguistic competence in the sphere of foreign language would be rather limited by clichés.
Such a situation when more books are available and fewer books are read causes certain difficulties in the foreign language acquisition, especially in grasping the complex concepts and senses of polysemic words. Of course, one can find the socially shared meanings of the word in a dictionary, but the attempts at finding and
learning all the potential senses of the word in the entry have proved to be inefficient, useless, and in most cases impossible. Only dealing with the word in its 'te x-tual field' (the term used by Alexander Kravchenko) [8] can provide active cogn i-tive processes of perceiving and remembering its features in a complex. These processes can start creating a concept relatively similar to the one of the native speaker's.
On the whole, stating here the primary role of the reading of fiction in foreign language acquisition, I certainly do not underestimate reading in general. Any textual field is good enough to learn the basic language structures, grammar laws, use of different form words, for example, the use of English articles widely spread in every register. (Any corpus of English will demonstrate that the articles 'a' and 'the' can be found among the words with the highest frequencies.) In foreign language acquisition spatial concepts play a special role among the basic and, therefore, most important concepts. Spatial metaphor permeates every cognitive domain which makes it necessary for a learner of a foreign language to get to know the words representing spatial concepts in the language and acquire their different senses through the extensive reading of texts representing different registers. Dealing with every new spatial term, a learner usually begins with its direct spatial meaning and then meeting the term in different contexts compares the spatial concept it represents with the similar spatial concept in his or her native language, as most spatial concepts are universal. However, it is also important to find the peculiarities of the spatial concept in question in both native and foreign language worldviews. Every learner of a foreign language including those who learn it for specific purposes can not acquire the language unless they grasp spatial concepts, as most terminology systems include spatial terms or their derivatives. Modern corpora can provide textual materials of reasonable size representing different registers, such as fiction, academic prose, editorials, popular lore, spoken language, etc. They are useful in the classroom and for individual work and alongside with other materials for extensive reading should become one of the important modern aids for foreign language teaching and learning.
To conclude I want to underline that if there is no possibility to learn a foreign language through everyday natural communication, positive dynamics of this language acquisition can be reached only by means of exploring its textual field. There are good reasons to use quality fiction as the major textual field.
References
1. Gasparov, B. M. (1996). Yazyk, pamyat', obraz. Lingvistika yazykovogo sushchestvovaniuya. M.: Novoye literaturnoye obozrenie.
2. Lees R. B., Klima E. S. (1963). Rules for English Pronominalization // Language 39 (1). Pp. 17-28.
3. Klima Ed. (1964). Negation in English // Fodor J. A. and Katz J.J. eds., The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. Pp. 246-323.
4. Karlsson F. (2008). Early generative linguistics and empirical methodology // M. Kyto and A. Ludeling, eds., Handbook on Corpus Linguistics. Vol. 1. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York. Pp. 14-32.
5. Shchukin A. N. (2007). Obucheniye inostrannym yazykam: teoriya i praktika: uchebnoe posobie dlya prepodavateley i studentov. Moscow.
6. Orwell G. Politics and the English Language [Electronic Resource]. URL: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english7e polit
7. URL: http://www.richmond.k 12.va.us/readamillion/readingquotes.htm (Дата обращения 05.06.2010)
8. Kravchenko A. V. (2008). Kognitivnyi gorizont yazykoznaniya. Irkutsk.
Федоров Александр Викторович
Доктор педагогических наук, профессор проректор по научной работе ФГБОУ ВПО «ТГПИ им. А.П. Чехова», г. Таганрог, Ростовская область, Россия
УДК 316.77:001.8 ББК 74.580.
МЕДИАОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНЫЕ ЦЕНТРЫ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ
ФРАНЦИИ*
В статье анализируется деятельность (основные цели и задачи, целевая аудитория, теоретические концепции, базовые блоки моделей, формы и методы работы) наиболее значимых центров медиаобразования в современной Франции, среди которых лидирующее положение занимает государственный национальный медиаобразовательный центр CLEMI.
Ключевые слова: Центры медиаобразования; медиаобразование; медиа-грамотность; медиакомпетентность; сравнительный анализ; школы; вузы; педагоги; Франция.
MEDIA EDUCATION CENTERS IN MODERN FRANCE The article examines the work (the basic goals and objectives, target audience, theoretical concepts, basic components of models, forms and methods), of the most
* Написано при финансовой поддержке Федеральной целевой программы «Научные и научно-педагогические кадры инновационной России» на 2009-2013 годы по мероприятию 1.1. (III очередь) - «Проведение научных исследований коллективами научно-образовательных центров» по лоту № 5. 2010-1.1-305-021 «Проведение научных исследований коллективами научно-образовательных центров в области психологических и педагогических наук», ГК 02.740.11.0604 по теме «Анализ эффективности российских научно-образовательных центров в области медиаобразования по сравнению с ведущими зарубежными аналогами» (рук.проекта - доктор педагогических наук, профессор А.В.Федоров).
