Why Don’t We Hear the Voice of the Modern Youth?

Abstract

The article is devoted to the current issue concerning the modern youth. At present adolescents are demonstrating extreme individualism, unwillingness to cooperate and collaborate with their peers at lessons and life. They lack skills of comprehension, reflection, sympathy and compassion. As a result problems with the soft skills development arise more often. Students cannot fulfil conventional tasks at lessons, do not take part in conversations, ignore group projects. They prefer individual tasks and ways of learning. At the same time the modern society and the labour market are also changing. Interestingly, employers are more likely to hire a person with minimum individualistic behaviour, as international companies reach more success when they have strong and capable members working together as an integral organism. Using methods of observation, interview, experiment and findings from the field of neuropsychology the author proposes certain strategies that may help the youth to overcome the difficulties with communication and meet the demands of the future employers. Among the strategies are mental maps, ‘disappearing text’ technique, problematic quest situation, storytelling, ‘Six thinking hats’ technology and others.

Keywords: Adolescents, Generation Z, motivation, soft skills, storytelling

Introduction

Today's youth do not have the skills of self-presentation. Students often belittle their merits, announce an unsuccessful answer in advance, thereby setting themselves and the audience for a deliberately failed performance.

One of the possible reasons for this can be called the transition of secondary schools to distance learning in 2019. For two years students did not have the opportunity to participate in school events where it is required to perform on stage and recite poetry, overcoming fear of public presentation. Moreover, the youth was not able to defend their school projects in front of the jury, as it was done online in the years of the pandemic.

In the meantime, young people dream of high positions, successful business and material wealth, but do not take into account the importance and relevance of the ability to build clear and logical monologues, to convey their thoughts to the audience, to interact with it, to answer questions and respond to criticism adequately. What is more, they should be able to lead constructive dialogues, to reach consensus through negotiations.

Problem Statement

Young people of the present time prefer to delegate these responsibilities to older generations (X and Y) (Popova & Kiziria, 2017). Adolescents become helpless even at the first difficulties in communicating with classmates and group-mates.

It was also noticed that when the young people are offered to choose from a monologue or a dialogue form of presentation, they prefer a monologue statement, or, it happens, that one person prepares the dialogue for two participants alone (Vićević et al., 2021).

It was also noticed that the younger generation is not able to fulfil the task of matching the cues of the dialogue according to the logic and the given communicative situation. The task is estimated as a ‘rather difficult’ by the youth themselves.

Research Questions

Difficulties with the exercises that are aimed at development of cooperation skills, team work and collaboration could occur due to the lack of live communication experience. The reason for the modern trend to prefer monologues to dialogues is not the absence of a partner in the audience. It could be the unwillingness to cooperate and adapt to a different rhythm and style of work. The new mode of behaviour should have its grounding and triggers. In the article we are considering some of the possible reasons for it.

that help to communicate thoughts clearly. Students should be able to speak to group mates, to listen to the interlocutor, to build relationships in a team, to develop emotional intelligence, to establish contact and position themselves in the community.

Purpose of the Study

Such "harmless" features can later lead to serious violations in communication of young people with their peers and colleagues in the future. As a result, they may lack the experience of interpersonal relationship. There may be an increase of conflicts due to misunderstanding and inability to negotiate. To date, there are many master-classes and courses that teach you how to speak, listen, remember, analyse, speak out and be heard. However, all the soft skills can be and should be developed as part of the curriculum at schools and universities. Joint project activities, holding conferences, discussions, seminars contribute to the development of skills that help to communicate thoughts clearly. Students should be able to speak to group mates, to listen to the interlocutor, to build relationships in a team, to develop emotional intelligence, to establish contact and position themselves in the community.

Research Methods

A research in the field of neuropsychology has found out that the centres of speech in the brain are associated with the development of memory divisions (Owlcation, PSYCGEEK, 2021). The lack of speech practice reduces the amount of memorized information significantly, erudition and the general intellectual development of adolescents suffer.

Young people are increasingly experiencing problems with remembering new information, such as new lexical units. Students often complain about their inability to come up with their own examples to illustrate the differences of the word meaning (of modal verbs, for example.) (Langlois, 2020).

The authors’ personal working experience helped to conduct the research and to draw conclusions. The period of close observation and analysis took about two years. The overall time of working with students of different ages and motivation comprises more than nineteen years. Active and passive observation, interview and experiment as the key methods of the research together with official surveys and state research grounds speak to the truth of the above presumption. Some of the meaningful results are going to be described further in the article.

Findings

Conclusion

All of the above strategies are primarily aimed at strengthening the motivation for academic knowledge and learning activities. Only modern, dynamic and interesting lesson content is able to attract the attention of young people, optimize the learning process and make the voice of young people sound more confident.

References

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