Comparative cognitive tasks as a means of forming a scientific linguistic world-picture in Russian language lessons in the 6th form

Abstract

The relevance of the issues the paper discusses is conditioned by the necessity to find effective means to form scientific ideas about language, the language system, and the connections between language and society in school students. The article aims to substantiate the methodological feasibility of using a comparative cognitive task in Russian language lessons as a tool to form students’ scientific linguistic world-picture. To achieve this goal, the study relied on the following research methods: theoretical-descriptive, observation, pedagogical experiment. The article specifies the concept of a «comparative cognitive task» in relation to the goals of teaching Russian at school. Such a task is a type of cognitive task aimed at discovering new knowledge by searching for similarities and differences in linguistic units of one or different languages. The paper proposes an original typology of comparative cognitive tasks based on lexical material. The typology, in accordance with the material underlying the task, includes 1) tasks of comparing facts from one language, 2) tasks of comparing facts from different languages. Depending on the activity method, comparative cognitive tasks are divided into 1) tasks of finding a marked element; 2) tasks of grouping linguistic phenomena; 3) tasks of conducting a stylistic experiment (when comparing facts from one language) or tasks of restoring text with gaps based on the comparison results (when comparing facts from different languages); 4) tasks of creating one’s own text based on the comparison results. The article gives examples of original tasks developed by the author and provides a methodological commentary on them. Moreover, the study interprets the results of testing these tasks in the sixth form, which enabled me to conclude that comparative cognitive tasks contribute to the formation of ideas about the language system and arouse students’ interest in linguistic phenomena.