Experience Of Multidisciplinary Interaction In The University Educational Environment

City epigraphy

The urban language environment includes both spontaneous oral speech and written texts - urban epigraphy (signs, banners, advertising posters, lightboxes, announcements, etc.) (Krotova et al., 2016; Mixajlyukova, 2017; Moskovkina, 2016; Savina, 2017). All this as a whole forms a natural speech space in which a city dweller lives (Shishova, 2018a; Trotsuk, 2017; Zemnukhova et al., 2019).

The impact of external urban attributes on native speakers

The written language, reflected in various external attributes, visually affects the residents of the city and creates the impression of the general culture of Pskov among its guests. Due to the fact that this ancient Russian city attracts with its sights, the number of Russian and foreign tourists is increasing every year.

Improving the practice-orientation of training course

At the moment, the urgent pedagogical task is to search for innovative teaching methods that can enhance the practical orientation of the training course and form an active position among students in the process of mastering knowledge. Attracting students to the implementation of the socio-humanitarian project “Clean City - Good Speech!” permits to come closer to solving the indicated problem. The project organizers and intermediaries between the public, local authorities and Russian language specialists of the Pskov State University were the Scientific and Educational Center of Russian Language and Culture named after Professor E. A. Maimin (until 2020 - Open Institute of the Russian Language and Culture) and Pskov regional public organization “Association of Humanitarian Culture”. The action was first held in 2016 and timed to the Russian Language Day in Russia (June, 6); Subsequently, it became an annual event. The action is aimed at the city and is designed to draw the attention of citizens and the administration to the need for a responsible attitude to the facts of written speech on the streets of the city. The purpose of the action is to popularize the idea of careful handling of the language when creating a visual image of the city by organizing the interaction of a wide range of participants.

Developing an active position of students in the process of study

The key message of the project is “Good speech for a clean city!” The word “good” emphasizes the quality of speech: not only its correspondence to spelling, punctuation, lexical and grammatical norms, but also the relevance of certain forms in a speech situation. Good speech is also associated with the propaedeutic ability of the speaker, with the ability to prevent the appearance of errors in other people’s and own statements.

The participation of students in the project is not mandatory, it is only one form of studying the issues of speech culture in the framework of the training course. The teacher invites the students to participate in the project, draws their attention to speech problems in the Pskov epigraphic urban sphere, shows students the possibility of actively transforming the urban speech environment. The participation of students in the project allows implementing a practice-oriented approach to the study of the training course in speech culture through observation of the language, and helps young people to recognize themselves as proactive participants in the urban community.

Enhancing the practical orientation of the course “Russian language and culture of speech”

The practical orientation of the training course “Russian Language and Speech Culture” is enhanced by attracting students to participate in the project.

Establishing interdisciplinary interaction opportunities in the university educational environment

Opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction in the university educational environment are established in the process of project activities.

Socio-humanitarian project “Clean city - good speech!”

In the process of studying various disciplines of a general educational nature, the project method of training is used, which involves attracting students of various majors to participate in the project “Clean City - Good Speech!”. The implementation of this socio-humanitarian project synthesizes both empirical (observation, comparison) and theoretical (analysis, synthesis, generalization) research methods.

Project Stages

The project consists of three stages: search, “media” and reflective.

• The search stage is the fixing of facts of violation of spelling and punctuation norms using special technical means.

• At the “media” stage, photo materials are sent to the email address: majmin.pskgu@gmail.com or placed independently in the albums of the Internet community http://vk.com/club118249452.

• The reflective stage involves participation in commenting on photographs: the nature of the error (s), recommendations for eliminating the error (s), link to the source.

Project Conditions

Violations of norms on external attributes should be recorded in the city of Pskov or its suburbs, participation in the project can be anonymous (if it is not connected with the educational process). Participation in the project is possible at any stage. The need is to comply with ethical standards when evaluating the material under discussion.

Project participants are the students of schools, of secondary specialized educational institutions of the city of Pskov, Pskov State University, school and university teachers, and all interested persons who are not indifferent to the problems of language and speech culture. Every year, on June, 6, which is the Day of the Russian Language in Russia, at a specially organized meeting, the results of the project are summarized, the most active participants are awareded. Information support for the project is provided by the portal of the Scientific and Educational Center of the Russian Language and Culture named after Professor E. A. Maimin (http://majmin.pskgu.ru/).

The educational activity of students as the project participants includes not only the search for erroneous spelling, but also development of the ability to qualify errors, explaining its causes. The media bank of examples allows students to highlight violations typical for urban epigraphy, which can become the subject of independent research when working over a term paper. During the project, students learn to work with special literature and refer to authoritative sources.

Participation in the project requires students to be ready for interpersonal interaction, the ability to work in a group. United in the study of linguistic disciplines, students of different areas of training during the implementation of the project actualize knowledge in their specialty and use research methods of related sciences to study the urban speech environment - this is how interdisciplinary interaction is carried out.

Victory in the correspondence stage of the competition “My country is my Russia”

The project allowed reaching a wide audience, the composition of its participants is mobile. The project’s online community has 177 registered members, the majority of whom are students of Pskov State University, i.e., the young generation of native speakers.

In 2019, the idea of the project and the forms of its implementation were approved by experts of the 16th All-Russian competition of youth personal projects and projects in the field of education aimed at the socio-economic development of Russian territories, “My country is my Russia”. The application for the competition was among 405 projects from 80 subjects of the Russian Federation presented during the full presence stage of the competition. The project presentation took place on May 13-15, 2019 at the Russian Academy of Education (Moscow).

Identification of types of misspellings in the Pskov epigraphy

Over the course of five years, 195 erroneous spellings have been identified that accompany the visual appearance of the city. Photographic materials with speech errors and linguistic comments on them are presented in an open campaign group (https://vk.com/club118249452).

The error phenomenon is presently studied by many researchers in various fields of knowledge. In philosophy, the theory of errors is developed and the concept of erroneous judgments or logical errors is discussed. In psychology, errors are considered as deviant manifestations in the behavior and activities (including speech) of an individual or social group, the cognitive status of the error phenomenon, the issues of processing error events in the conceptualization of the world by the cognizing subject are investigated (Semenova, 2012). Linguistic research clarifies the very concept of error and its status in the processes of language functioning, speech errors are studied taking into account the normative and functional approaches and are considered in the aspect of methodological problems (Bulgakova et al., 2016; Potapova, 2016). Thus, errors are recognized as the immanent property of the system, they make up the informative part of the linguistic picture of the world in the minds of people.

Recognizing the objective reality of a general philosophical view of the phenomenon of error, we believe that a practice-oriented approach in pedagogy and language teaching methods regards error as a negative social phenomenon. Therefore, in the framework of a socio-humanitarian project, an error is considered as a linguistic-cultural concept (deviation from the norm, violation of the norm), which carries a negative connotation and requires public disapproval.

The Pskov speech material is heterogeneous both in composition and in the types of regular errors. The composition of the examples includes advertising products, announcements, boards, signs with historical and cultural information for tourists. During the project, errors typical for the urban environment were identified: lack of a hyphen in a single attachment, when spelling adverbs; the absence of quotation marks in the names of organizations; misspellings of double consonants; lack of an uppercase letter in two-element toponyms or its misuse. Common punctuation errors are related to the absence of a comma both in a simple sentence with homogeneous terms, with separate definitions expressed by the participle, and in a complex sentence.

Thus, the urban environment determines the scope of the epigraphy (services, advertising, names of food places and courts, etc.). Material carriers of epigraphy (sign, announcement, banner, lightbox, board, etc.) are limited in form, which requires restrictions on the length of the text. The combination, on the one hand, of extreme brevity, and on the other hand, of maximum informational content, creates conditions for the appearance of errors in the epigraphic text when choosing language means and ways of transmitting them in writing.

The project results are reported in media addresses, in which such cases are analyzed, thus attracting the attention of citizens to the modern speech situation:

• http://pskgu.ru/page/84eee56d-4bef-4008-97cc-01d8d553aca3;

• http://www.gtrkpskov.ru/radio/radio-programs/startovaya-ploshchadka/510038-startovaya-ploshchadka-den-russkogo-yazyka-efir-06-06-18.html;

• https://pskgu.ru/page/5f897011-2cab-43db-b0e1-3d786a5cffcf etc.

It should be recognized that from year to year there are no fewer errors in the Pskov city epigraphy: a total of 59 misspellings identified in the 2016-2017 academic year, 37 - in the academic year 2017-2018, 29 - in the academic year 2018-2019, and 70 – in the academic year 2019-2020. Statistics shows that, in general, there are no trends in the number of errors, the phenomenon has a stable spontaneous character.

Establishing the multidisciplinary interaction in the university educational environment

The format of the socio-humanitarian project made it possible to define multidisciplinary interaction in the university educational environment as a perspective trend. At present, multidisciplinarity is considered to be a didactic condition for improving the quality of education, as it focuses on creating a holistic picture of the world in the minds of students, helps bring the content of education closer to real life, initiates educational and cognitive activities of students, and acts as a means of forming intellectual and practice-oriented skills. and skills that optimize the learning process (Мamedov, 2017).

Multidisciplinarity in regards to the project “Clean City - Good Speech!” is actualized as the interconnection of sciences and academic subjects, which arises in the project, research method of studying the topic. The project allows making intersubject interaction with psychological research carried out in line with environmental psychology. If traditionally the forefront in this area was the impact on humans of unfavorable natural factors, now the emphasis is shifting to the influence of the anthropogenic environment, up to the daily interaction with the living space - objective, temporary, social, informational (Miroshkin et al., 2019) . In this regard, the urban environment is becoming a popular object of study for psychologists who emphasize that the process of urbanization creates special conditions for human life.

In physical terms, the urban environment takes into account, first of all, architectural and landscape features, but for an individual, the informational and symbolic layer of relationships related to life in the city is of no less importance (Shishova, 2018b). In addition to the objective components of urban space, it is necessary to analyze the characteristics of the information impact and the presentation of urban symbols (Arkette, 2004). Thus, it can be argued that the quality of urban texts is an important component of the urban environment, affecting the mentality of city residents.

The psychological ideas of studying the urban text as an important component of the environment find a response in the field of linguistics, namely in such direction as ecolinguistics, which tries to assess how harmonious the relationship of a person with his textual environment are.

The development of the city’s living space takes place through experiencing the physical and sociocultural characteristics of the urban environment, which affect the emotional state and behavior of a person (Muzychuk, 2016). It can be assumed that the perception of incorrect epigraphic information by the city residents causes them to feel discomfort, tension, displeasure, disappointment, irritation, a sense of uncertainty and lack of control over the situation. To study the listed manifestations of the psychological well-being of citizens, modifications of psychosemantic methods that are actively used by psychologists to study various aspects of the urban environment can be used.

Researchers of the urban environment noted that “the urban environment acts as a factor (condition) for the formation of subjective qualities of a person (group), manifested in the activity of a person (group) interacting with the city” (Droby`sheva, & Zhuravlev, 2016, p. 208). It is emphasized that social groups of citizens can act as a collective subject, characterized by various forms of group behavior and capable of significantly affecting the transformation of the city environment (Belanche et al., 2017). That is why it seems to us important to study the motivation for the participation of city residents in the campaign, as well as identify the ways to stimulate their motivation.

In the legal plane lies the study of civil, commercial, international law and the expert assessment of legislative acts in the legal regulation of advertising activities, which will establish the requirements for advertising products, even at the stage of their manufacture in order to prevent the penetration of erroneous texts into the urban speech environment. In the field of interaction with designers lies the development of high-quality information material that accompanies the project (flyers, booklets, linguistic commentary on photo materials in an accessible and visually attractive form). One of the promising tasks is the development of QR codes containing a linguistic reference for each erroneous spelling, using a modern Internet QR code generator, since a native speaker needs to be shown an alternative to negative speech material.

Formation of universal competencies of students

The educational results of the project include the formation of universal competencies of students, which are manifested in the ability to carry out business communication in oral and written forms in the state language of the Russian Federation and foreign language (s), the ability to perceive the intercultural diversity of society in socio-historical, ethical and philosophical contexts.

The project method allows students to develop the skills of interaction, non-conflict and the ability to achieve results in the process of communication. Another advantage of the project method is the ability to bridge the knowledge gaps that project participants discover during its implementation - this initiates them to search for answers to theoretical questions that have appeared (Shulezhkova & Maksimova, 2019).

According to students, the format of the project, the lack of elements of coercion to participate only increases interest in it. During the implementation of the project, students compiled more than 70 linguistic comments on the identified errors, made a booklet and a flyer. In 2019, a linguogeographic method was applied to the description of identified errors. Students put all the places where erroneous epigraphy is recorded on the city map, the principle of frequency made it possible to identify the locations of the greatest distribution of negative speech material in the Pskov urban sphere - the historical part of the city also belongs to them.

The practical importance of student participation in the project

The participation of students in the project is of great practical importance, since spelling and punctuation vigilance is sharpened in an accessible and attractive way for a modern native speaker of the language. During the implementation of the project, a skill is developed to work with established dictionaries and reference books when forming a linguistic commentary; student develop the ability to identify typical errors in the media bank and give recommendations on how to eliminate them.

The prospect of an interdisciplinary approach

The work within the framework of the project actualized the need to implement an interdisciplinary understanding of the problem posed, which can be achieved by combining the efforts of specialists representing a wide variety of subject areas. So, the study of the composition and quality of urban epigraphy can be promising in terms of psychology, law, marketing, design, information technology.

The development of the project in an interdisciplinary direction will allow students studying in various areas of training to integrate their specialized subject knowledge with general cultural language competencies. It will contribute to an integrated approach to solving the problems of the information space of the city and the formation of an active position of youth as a significant subject in improving the communicative environment.