Integrative Approach To Teaching Russian In A Multicultural Audience

Abstract

The article touches upon the issues of the formation of speech activity skills in a multicultural audience with regard to the integrative approach to teaching the Russian language. Practice shows that in the Russian language classes, working with a text is usually done on a fragmentary basis, which leads to an imbalance in the formation of linguistic and communicative competences. Linguistic competence, involving the formation of lexical and grammatical speech skills, is a key to the development of expressive and receptive types of speech activity. The authors propose that fragmentation in speech activities formation be overcome by implementing the technology of the artistic text resource analysis, which involves systematic step-by-step work with a Russian artistic text in the multilingual audience, to achieve a multiple educational effect. As a result, students develop the ability of true understanding, they begin to think critically, to comprehend the logical sequence of the text parts, to consider the context, to express their opinion about what they’ve read, justifying their point of view.

Keywords: Speech activityRussian languagemulticultural audienceartistic textmultiple educational effect

Introduction

The centuries of national civilization history which unites hundreds of peoples in the Russian Federation, proves that ethno-cultural and religious peculiarities have been preserved and developed on the common cultural base, firmly grounded by the Russian culture content. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, "Russian civilization identity is based on preservation of the Russian cultural dominant, which is carried not only by ethnic Russians, but also by all bearers of such identity regardless of nationality..." (Putin, 2013, para. 8).

In this regard, the formation of Russian civil identity seems to be a super-task of multicultural education, where three interacting cultural flows - national-regional, all-Russian and world - are combined in the federal component designated in the relevant normative documents, educational standards in particular. For their organic integration, the multicultural approach offers an educational description of the world with a precisely chosen didactic position, an adequate psychological, cultural, historical and geographical localization of the community the students belong. Thus, the cultural tradition is consistently embedded in the large-scale picture of the Russian and world civilizations respectively. The conceptual unity and substantive integrity of the multicultural educational basis seem to be the only acceptable way to avoid the danger of opposing ethno-cultural and civic identities, to prevent splitting students’ personality.

While meeting the challenges of building a solidarity society, the educational system plays a particular role, because, on the one hand, it can carry out the upbringing a uniform civil nation most effectively, and on the other hand – create conditions for perception of the basic ethno-cultural values by the young multicultural generation in order to transfer them to the next generations of the country.

Considering the mentioned above, we can see at least two immutable grounds for the realization of multicultural education at the level of public policy. At the tactical level, the development of multicultural education depends on the successful overcoming the threats of social instability that arise from the lack of readiness of young people to live in conditions of the increasing multiculturalism of Russian society. In the strategic sense, multicultural education is an essential tool for the Russian civic identity formation in the context of globalization processes.

The model of a multicultural school provides the most complete solution to these problems. At such a school, educational process is based on implementing the innovative principles, technologies and techniques through the introduction of educational programs and, respectively, textbooks of the new integrated (matrix) type, the content of which harmoniously combines subject and cultural knowledge from the field of their ethnic culture, Russian culture, the culture of other peoples of the Russian Federation, world culture.

It is no accident that, according to the current Federal State Educational Standards, within the framework of educational tasks solution, the role of the Russian language and main types of speech activity is being transformed significantly. The Russian language is not only an educational subject, but also a means of learning, and in poly-ethnic regions accordingly serves as a guide to a people's culture in the world of other cultures (Nikiforova, Borisova, & Shadrina, 2016). Therefore, the fundamental problem of forming types of speech activity (listening, reading, speaking and writing) remains relevant due to its multifaceted nature and complexity of implementation.

The solution of this complex task should be sufficiently innovative and carried out by the introduction of the appropriate educational material of the integrated type, the content of which should harmoniously combine special and cultural knowledge of both the universal and all-Russian format, and the ethno-cultural level, acting as a single whole. Ethno-cultural orientation, all-Russian cultural values and universal human ideals should be combined on the basis of the principles of ideological and thematic unity, meaningful conformity and systematization, with the comprehension of the surrounding natural and social world being built in accordance with the national mentality. “Mentality is represented as a certain universal stereotype for each specific representative of a conceptual picture of the world, in other words individual conceptual pictures of the world become mentality options” (Kolesov, 2004, p. 56). The process described represents a movement from ethnic to regional, further to national and, finally, to universal human, i.e. from close to distant, from concrete to abstract, from known to unknown.

Firstly, this will allow building a process of learning on principles more appropriate to the peculiarities of human cognitive activity, and, secondly forming the student's idea of his ethnic culture as an element of all-Russian and world cultures, and about himself - as an heir to his ethno-cultural tradition, worthy to the citizen of the Russian state and a member of the world community.

Problem Statement

Our study of the various factors of achieving a multiple educational effect in a multicultural audience focuses on the integrative approach in the formation of necessary competences on the material of speech works – artistic texts.

Experience has shown that working with the text in classes on the Russian language, is usually fragmented, which results in disparity in the formation of linguistic and communicative competences. Teaching complex productive reading as a process of extracting information from the analyzed text is often replaced by "elaboration" of reading material aloud, question-and-answer forms of work, translation, retelling, etc. Reading as a special type of speech activity is not always taught. Unfortunately, it often falls out of the teacher's field of view. Reading in class, in many cases seems to have lost its autonomy, turning into an attribute of oral speech while the material for reading becomes an additional incentive for the development of speaking skills. Reading the text and working on its structural components have a significant impact on the development of students’ speech skills, but there is no need for the whole work on reading to be subject to these tasks.

The text of a book is a kind of mechanism with highly concentrated information. The text structure and techniques creating the text space are chosen by the writer independently, thus giving the material for both text organization and reader’s programming in the certain way, which presents, in its turn, the first perception of the text. (Davydova, Egorova, Kovalevich & Tomasheva, 2016, p. 60)

Linguistic competence, which includes forming lexical and grammatical speech skills, is a key link in the development of expressive and receptive types of speech activity.

Thus, the problem of synchronous formation of speech activity types is considered by the authors in line with the integrative approach to language teaching based on working with a text in a multicultural audience.

Research Questions

The basis for formation of speech skills is presented by a coherent unit – the text, which is characterized by properties that qualitatively distinguish it from other units of the language system, since only a whole text can fully express the author's intention, his conception, i.e. has the sense that cannot be confined to the sum of the meanings of its constituent language units.

The text is capable of a sense increment, which is due to the functioning of the speech work in a socio-cultural context. Therefore, the whole text ceases to be a purely linguistic phenomenon, transforming into something bigger and more complex, in particular, into a cultural phenomenon, owing to which the work with the text appears to be an indivisible unity of different aspects: linguistic and cultural. Linguistic aspects include lexical, grammatical, stylistic, and those of speech and cultural aspects include historical, philosophical, political, religious, and others, which generally represent the result of content and form synthesis (Ermakova, 2017).

Therefore, relying on the text as a systemic and complex phenomenon, and stimulating all kinds of speech activities: both active (speaking and writing) and passive (listening and reading), make it possible to teach the Russian language in a multicultural audience successfully.

Consideration should also be given to the inclusion of linguistic and stylistic norms in the communicative norm as broader in scope, since it covers all aspects of the process of communication: both the text created by the communicants and the pragmatic accounts of communication itself.

The communicative norm also manifests itself in the focus on the values and regulations existing in a given culture, including ethical norms and moral imperatives. In this case, we speak about a cultural framework of communication, beyond which the discourse is marked as abnormal. This frame will span the entire communicative multicultural space, and therefore in each specific case it is possible to speak not only about the positive or negative cultural coloring of communication, but also about the awareness of the use of language units, including those outside the limits of the norm:

The sources of the comic in the aesthetic aspect are speech errors. Such speech errors, due to which a contradiction between form and content of speech is created, give it the evident comic effect. At the same time speech norms, which are violated in utterances, have the main role in our perception of speech shortcoming as comic, comedic. (Gorina, Gorobets, Nikulnikova & Chernova, 2016, p. 95)

The deliberate derogation from the language norm is explained not only by the teacher's desire to create the atmosphere of relaxed communication in class, but also by the desire to teach the use of such derogations in speech as a language game in order to bring the students to a new level of language proficiency.

Purpose of the Study

The study is aimed to overcome the fragmentation of the speech activities formation using the technology of the artistic text resource analysis in the process of teaching the Russian language in a multicultural audience.

The work with an artistic text in such an environment on the base of using the technology of the text resource analysis should form a kind of the "bank" of reference stereotypical grammatical combinations in the language memory of students. Being fixed in consciousness, the system of reference grammatical combinations allows students to estimate the language fragment from the positions: "known"/"unknown"; "typical"/"atypical," regular "/" irregular, "etc. Therefore, in the process of multidimensional approach to the work with an artistic text, the range of stereotypical combinations is expanded, which makes it possible to apply speech models using the new lexical material.

At the same time, achievement of the most important educational tasks ensuring motivation and interest in the Russian language, such as: speech reaction rate, critical thinking, communication skills, memory improvement, imagination, creativity, etc., becomes possible due to the use of text resource analysis technology, which enhances the analytical-synthetic processing of the original artistic text (Hitchcock, 2018).

Thus, the described approach allows the lesson of the Russian language to be transformed both into the process of mastering certain knowledge about the language, and the process of developing students’ speech, thought and spirit. The result of their active cognitive activity will be the formation of stable skills for speech production and speech comprehension.

Research Methods

The above-mentioned problems of teaching the Russian language in a multicultural audience have led to the use of following research methods:

• the method of complex theoretical analysis of the phenomenon, directed to the study and systematization of scientific and methodical literature, the analysis of cultural and language contents in programs;

• the method of componential analysis of the investigated phenomenon, which allows revealing structural, linguistic, regional, etc. components of the Russian language teaching content, concerning the aspect of forming speech activity types;

• the method of observation over the process of teaching the Russian language in a multicultural audience;

• the comparative method allows revealing and presenting both universal and specific elements of languages and cultures in the material;

• the method of systematic description of the phenomenon under consideration, representing types of speech activity as a unity of synchronously created skills of verbalizing a thought

Findings

As a result of our research, the structure of the technology of the artistic text resource analysis is revealed as a complex, specifically organized activity in a multicultural audience, consisting of successive stages.

At the first stage, the teacher prepares students to perceive the text which should be, first of all, interesting and entertaining, based on something familiar, but at the same time containing intrigue. The most appropriate seems the use of productive reading technology, which involves a multifaceted work with the text to help students understand the content of the text and activate new language phenomena (Karavas, 2015). This technology is aimed at the formation of universal communicative actions which ensure the ability to interpret the text and give one’s own viewpoint, adequately understand the interlocutor /author, the ability for thoughtful text reading, silent and aloud, as well as universal cognitive actions, the main of which is the ability to extract information from the text.

In our view, such reading acts as a means of formation and control of adjacent speech and language skills, as the use of reading allows students to optimize the process of learning language and speech material. Understanding of the text and its implications, as well as the ability to see and use language models in the future, comes to the forefront. In the aspect of immersion in the speech structure of the work, the process of reading as a type of speech activity has the following purpose: using certain reading technologies, to teach students to extract information from the text in the amount necessary to solve a specific communicative problem.

At the second stage, the work on the text is being modified. The analytical conversation is built on two levels:

• the level of meaning, implying the ability to highlight the message and details illustrating the basic idea(s), to summarize the facts presented, to determine the links between events in the text;

• the level of sense, implying the ability to form a judgment on the basis of facts, to draw a conclusion, to evaluate the facts presented, to understand the implications, the message, to find the artistic means of expressiveness and to determine their role in the narrative.

Challenges at this level are usually related to the possible polysemy of the word, specifics of its lexical and grammatical combinability, peculiarities of the syntax construction structures, etc.

At the third stage, the teacher offers communication-oriented tasks for controlling vocabulary and grammar, listening, writing and oral speech, based on the material of the text under discussion.

Analyzing the formation of cognitive operations in the process of developing speech skills in a multicultural audience, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of working on the vocabulary and grammar of the Russian language: the formation of awareness of operations with grammar is closely related to the development of cognitive ability and the ability to use certain vocabulary-and-grammar models in a particular speech situation.

Organized in this way, the systemic work with the artistic text as a whole and with its fragments helps to identify various types of explicit and implicit information, to feel confident in working with various types of such information. The ability of students to work with different types of texts ensures that they successfully interact with information resources in the future, after graduation. Hence comes the importance of applying the technology of the artistic text resource analysis. As a result, students develop the ability of true understanding, they begin to think critically, to comprehend the logical sequence of the text parts, to consider the context, to express their opinion about what they’ve read, giving their point of view.

Thus, implementing this technology, the teacher draws the students’ attention to the following resources of the analyzed artistic text:

• at the phonetic level – to the pronunciation of words /word combinations;

• at the lexical level – to the lexical meaning, systemic relations in the vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms, combinability, homonymy, polysemy), idioms, etc.;

• at the morphological level – to the meaning of cases, case forms with prepositions and without; synonymic and homonymic prepositions; full and shortened adjectives; degrees of their comparison; forms of the verb;

• at the syntax level – to the construction of simple and complex sentences according to different patterns; detection of text cohesion, analysis of compositional features, etc.;

• on the stylistic level – to the specific use of stylistically and emotionally colored language means, etc.

Conclusion

Thus, the implementation of this technology enables the teacher to create conditions for the development of cognitive activity through the use of active forms of teaching, which make it possible for students to comprehend one’s speech experience, transform it and combine with theoretical knowledge, shaping on this base their skills of speech communication. In doing so, language formulas and clichés are brought to automatism, as well as a fresh, creative view on the use of certain language means in certain speech conditions is developed. In a multicultural audience, such comprehensive work promotes deeper understanding of both the explicit and implicit information of the text, develops memory, which allows achieving a multiple educational effect. In the challenging context of multiethnic composition of students, it is the lessons of the Russian language that have a beneficial effect on the formation of inter-ethnic communication culture, and tolerance in the multicultural society.

References

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