Речевое поведение русскоязычных школьников Латвии

Creating a text (especially written) is definitely a complicated task for a schoolchild. For example, text structuring, according to scientists, is a meta-linguistic skill, which is hard to form for a schoolchild in any language regardless of a certain language (Schoonen, Gelderen, Stoel & others, 2011: 46). In most cases, as our analysis shows, ninth-graders' compositions consist of one detailed paragraph. The topic is usually not covered completely, texts contain much irrelevant speech material.

Teenagers are better in creating narrative texts, then descriptive or argumentative texts. Argumentation is a complicated form of monologue, because “reality is expressed in it as intermediated by mental (logical) operations. As a result, there is a necessity of doubleexpressed logicality, i.e. following objective (cause-and-effect relations between events and phenomena) and notional (obeying laws of thoughts) logic” (Kirillova, 2008).

Whatever our pupils write about, they aim at stenograph of event description with minimal use of means of linguistic expressivity. According to E. Bialystok, one of the reasons of this speech pragmatism is that “form the point of view of cognitive processes creating a text for a bilingual is more complicated than for a monolingual. This is due to the fact that during writing and speaking a bilingual's cognitive sphere constantly controls two language systems, supressing one of them and activating the other” (Bialystok, 2007: 218). But in our situation, this alarming symptom in schoolchildren's speech behaviour should be also explained by the fact that at the lessons in the second (Latvian) language, which pupils do not speak well yet, they try to understand the most important things -- facts, general contents (which is usually expressed by nouns, verbs, adverbs). “Wonderful details”, expressed by adjectives, tropes, figures are not usually understood, seem useless and then do not appear in schoolchildren's speech in their first language. This is proved by children's answers to our questions. The question “There are a lot of nouns and verbs in your composition. Why do you think there are almost no adjectives? ” is usually answered as follows: “Why should I have them? I have told about everything without them”, or “I wanted to write about what happened and not how it happened”, or “The main thing is to render information. I've done it”.

Our analysis of ninth-graders' compositions has shown that only 25 % of them clearly formulated the problem, 24 % could interpret the thesis. And even in this case their compositions rarely contain traditional introductions: lyrical digressions, rhetoric questions, argumentation of the title (judgement), dialogue with the imaginary communicator, quotations, proverbs, etc. Most introductions lack argumentative features, the thesis is formulated in such a way that it does not need any evidence (it is useless to prove apparent things!).

About 30 % of nine-graders followed compositional rules of an argumentative text and formulated the requested number of arguments. The rest of them partially or fully changed the thesis during argumentation, did not try to prove the correctness of the thesis or did not use logical means of argumentation, factual and cultural information in argumentation. For example, describing Old Riga, the place which is worth visiting for potential tourists, only some schoolchildren used cultural and historical facts (not always correct ones) as arguments. The main aim of visiting Old Riga is, as most children think, to entertain, have a rest, have some fun, meet friends, go shopping. Discussing the topic “Travelling is like a small life” (What is the role of travelling in human life? Why do people travel? -- the key questions of argumentation), the nine-graders' arguments were as follows: travelling is 1) entertainment, emotions, something new in a dull life (44 %); 2) the opportunity to forget your problems (32 %); 3) an adventure which can change you (18 %); 4) a new experience (knowing other nations, their customs and traditions) (5 %); 5) an opportunity to share your experience (to tell other tourists about potential mistakes in travelling) (1 %). As we see, getting new experience, knowledge (one of the most important aims and values of travelling) in the children's system of values takes only the fourth place.

Most of the nine-graders (89%) proved their points of view basing on their own experience or their friends and relatives' experience, and this is really a serious problem which could be characterised as failure to overstep the boundaries of their own reflexive experience. There is almost no factual or cultural information, so there are no references to the sources of information in the schoolchildren's texts as well, i.e. the children do not try to integrate their knowledge which they get at other lessons (history, geography, culturology). What is the reason of this? On the one side, in order to use “strong” arguments in argumentation, you should have a broad outlook, know a lot, be able to find new information and assess it. Communication with Latvian teachers and schoolchildren shows, regretfully, the opposite thing: children's knowledge of the world is poor, stereotypical, unobjective (and what is more important -- children do not worry about it). On the other hand, in Latvian schools there is such a practice as “preparing children for compositions”. It is interesting that schoolchildren from different Latvian regions write very similar compositions (we mean the contents and children's speech behaviour). This is due to the fact that teachers often impose samples, ready-made phrases. We have the same situation in our schools; the situation was characterised by E.L. Erokhina (Doctor of Pedagogy, Deputy Director of the Institute of Philology of Moscow Pedagogical State University) in one of her interviews: “Teachers do everything for children not to think themselves, but create a profane text and get their bonuses, while the teachers get their points”. As a result, one of the features of Latvian Russian-speaking nine-graders' written texts (as well as those of twelve-graders and students) is that children do not write compositions, they construct them. This situation was described in I.Yu. Gats' monograph “Linguistic education of schoolchildren in modern language situation”: “We are losing the feeling of border between texts, created on our own, and somebody else's texts. <...> Acquiring somebody's texts is the means of entering the culture” (Gats, 2012: 37). The author explains it by the fact that “in a new communicative environment a traditional mono-dimensional text is replaced by a multi-dimensional hypertext, <...> the method of constructing textual and mental spaces is changed” (Gats, 2012: 65).

In their argumentation our ninth-graders prefer explicit I-communication. Their texts lack understanding of somebody else's point of view, perception of another person, understanding another perspective (“perspective taking” is deeply researched in N. Buckley, L.S. Siegel, S. Ness's works). In our opinion, it can be explained by the fact that at language lessons (and the lessons on other humanitarian subjects) the main attention is paid to students' introspection, creating texts where students only need to express their own opinion of a problem or situation. As a result, an egocentric speech behaviour is formed, and the pupils' texts are primitive in their syntactic, semantic, and thematic characteristics. Such texts, which are also not very long (it is impossible to speak a lot about your own relation), “simple in theme and rheme developing, are created by people with unbalance between left-brain and right-brain verbal structures” (Butakova, 2016: 5).

Only 10 % of pupils wrote their texts according to language norms. “The rating” of the pupils' mistakes is as follows: the first place -- different stylistic mistakes (90 % of pupils), the second place -- punctuation mistakes (61 %), the third place -- orthographic mistakes (37 %). As we see, the main problems are stylistic mistakes and faults in pupils' speech behaviour, the most typical being verbalism, tautology, pleonasms, clichйs, breaking rules of lexical combinability.

Conclusion

Despite of long-term experience in bilingual education in the schools of national minorities in Latvia, the question about what and how to teach pupils is still controversial, politicized, not solved didactically, first of all in the aspect of forming a successful pupil's linguistic personality in the first and second languages simultaneously (the personality is to be bilingual). It is really important to understand this, because “the second language grows on base of the first one, is formed depending on the level of the first language. The level of the first language is like a doorstep for learning the second one” (Protasova, 2005). Or, according to G.I. Bogin, a secondary linguistic personality is “a structural mould of the primary linguistic personality” (Bogin, 1998: 3). In Latvia, to the moment of finishing school pupils usually get either not so effective linguistic personality in the two languages or “deleting” the first (Russian) language. The modern reform in education in Latvia (Skola 2030, 2018) substantially limited the possibility to form an integral linguistic personality in the Russian language for Latvian schoolchildren. U ntil 2018, the proportion of the Russian and Latvian languages in education depended on the bilingual model chosen by the school. Nowadays, in Latvia there have been adopted поправки to education law which decreased the role of the Russian language in school education (Skola 2030, 2018). This situation can lead to further decrease of the quality of pupils' speech behaviour (first of all, written one).

We have to solve many important didactic problems. One of them (probably, the most important one) is how in a new educational environment the idea “culture -- language -- personality” can be realized in school course of the Russian language. The second problem is the choice of texts for lessons of the Russian language. There is a situation that the texts which schoolchildren work with at the lessons of the Russian language and literature are substantially different form the texts of their natural speech environment. The latter ones cannot be called pattern and aesthetically ideal, but they are real language practice of the children. As a result, there is a contradiction in the children's consciousness, so “schoolchildren do not see learning their native language as a necessary condition of organizing their own everyday language existence” (Gats, 2017: 215). This does not mean that at the lessons we have to deny culture texts which form the speech ideal. This means that didactic material should also include Internet texts. The third problem is the criteria of composition themes, text logics and composition, their genre and assessment. It is obvious, that writing a composition for many modern schoolchildren is hard and dull work, that does not bring any pleasure or satisfaction and is to a great extent stereotypical. It is hardly possible to get interesting and informative texts from children. We think, that TV. Vasilenko is right saying that the reasons of low quality of modern schoolchildren's compositions not in the fact, that “children stop thinking about the problems of the modern world and analysing them”, but in the fact that “composition is understood as a “dead” genre, “вещь в себе”, having no practical relevance in real life” (Vasilenko, 2015).

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