Intonational and sound interpretation of dialogic fragments in N. V. Gogol’s poem "Dead Souls" in the Russian language lessons

Abstract

The paper exposes a contradiction between the subject-specific (listening and reading) educational outcomes required in the Federal State Educational Standard of basic compulsory education and the actual data concerning the development of teenagers’ receptive skills. The author suggests adopting an integrated approach to teaching the two above-mentioned types of speech activity. Learners are instructed in listening and reading in an interconnected manner using the method of intonational and sound text interpretation. The study relies on literature analysis, the content analysis of scientific concepts, the methods of concretization and reading activity modelling in conjunction with an abstraction technique. Intonational and sound interpretation is construed as a teaching method and a type of creative reading. Additionally, the paper brings to light the differences between reading aloud and role-reading on the one hand and intonational and sound interpretation on the other. The differentiating features of the proposed activity are its dialogic nature; the attitude to text as to an object open to modifications; the focus on addressing the acoustic-semantic issues related to textual transfer from visual to auditory modality; applicability in Russian lessons in the 8th–9th forms. The paper describes a processual model of a reader’s activity. The intonational and sound text interpretation includes the stages of orientation, performance, reflection, and evaluation. The performance stage consists in working with the author’s speech plane as well as the character’s speech plane and the reading activity itself. The paper presents a detailed methodology of working with N. V. Gogol’s poem "Dead Souls"; moreover, other works which can be subject to an intonational and sound interpretation in Russian lessons in the 8th–9th forms are mentioned. The research resulted in an enumeration of the conditions necessary to efficiently organise intonational and sound text interpretation. These include the choice of a sound-oriented work for reading; group work; practicing in spoken form without recording the results of the conversion from written speech to oral speech in writing; the audio recording of the product of intonational and sound interpretation of a dialogic fragment. The author concludes that the chosen method facilitates the development of learners’ skill to comprehend what they read; motivates them to orient themselves in the work while converting an excerpt from the visual into the auditory modality; gives an idea of the polyphony of a literary text. Moreover, it promotes the psychophysiological mechanisms that are involved in the auditory activity and reading (memory, attention, acoustic control, the converting mechanism, probabilistic forecasting); enriches readers’ apperceptive basis (background knowledge), stimulates readers’ interaction in a work group.