Развитие письменной речи учащихся: методический потенциал аналитических заданий

Abstract

The paper examines methodological conditions necessary to achieve the expected learning outcomes of studying Russian as a school subject. To be more specific, careful attention is paid to such aspects of teaching school students as written text creation, analysis, and assessment of their own and other learners’ speech acts from the standpoint of the communicative task, situation, and the conditions of communication. The performed analysis of learners’ final (‘December’) essays and detailed (comprehensive) answers written in the Unified State Exam (EGE) in the humanities testifies to the existence of serious shortcomings in teaching school students to produce written speech spontaneously. One of the most significant problems is the mass creation of pseudo-texts by school students in conjunction with written speech templating. The major reasons for this phenomenon lie in methodological flaws such as the replacement of writing skills formation by preparation for a specific essay type. Other flaws consist in the lack of attention to the specific features of writing as a speech activity and in the prevalence of teaching practices related to producing texts on the basis of clichés and templates suggested by the teacher. The aim of the paper is to substantiate the point that teaching writing will only become effective in case learners are aware of the specific nature, features, and laws of writing treated as a type of speech activity. The analysis of methodological research into learners’ speech development issues, works on speech studies and the psychology of speech combined with a comparative analysis of learners’ detailed written answers enabled the author to obtain the results presented in this paper. The method employed in the study is modelling a system of tasks on the basis of a rhetorical approach. The analytical tasks described in the study are specially tailored for school students. Doing them, learners will definitely gain an insight into the dialogic nature of written speech as it is addressed to an ‘imaginary interlocutor’. They will also become aware of the distinctive features of a writing person’s motivation as well as primary objectives that have to be achieved at each stage of writing. The excerpts from school-leavers’ essays with comments made by the author confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.