«When I am a Grandma – in Ten Years or So...»: Schoolchildren’s Compositions about Elderly and Old Age

Abstract

The study is aimed at assessing communicative, semantic and structural aspects of schoolchildren’s text-based activity; determining the actual semantic structure of the conceptual area connected with an old age, as well as the types of vocal acts applied to verbalisation of senses in the process of extemporaneous written speech production. Resources: texts of the compositions «An old man, what is he?»; «Old age, what is it?», «In old age I will be...», written by seventh- grade Russian students in Omsk in 2020. The applied methodology involves complex analysis for identifying communicative (speech strategies and tactics, type of communication), cognitive (actualisation of meaning and cognitive structures), semantic (selection of words, distribution of subjective features, selection of predicates, etc.) parameters. Results of the research: the author reveals certain dominance of variably developing typical scenarios associated with specific cognitive fragments in the linguistic consciousness as well as particular impact of social stereotypes associated with age, old age, old person. The author comes to the following conclusions: competence in communicative norms and structure of reasoning, predominance of self-communication, lack of dependence between the choice of the communication model and stating of the topic; actual semantic spaces and cognitive structures in the old age conceptual area: family – «love for children and grandchildren, care, help» / «abandonment»; lifestyle – «physical and intellectual activity », «health» / «lack of interest», «illness»; life as past – present – future – «work, money, business», «joy, fun, pleasure », «sadness, weakness»; a person – «different types of elderly people», «optimism» / «grumpiness», «experience», «wisdom»; the nature of the written speech actions consists in endowing with quality, transferring the activity of the subject – a person and his age state with the help of a restricted vocabulary basic for the semantic field of age (elderly, old, an old man, grandmother, grandfather, getting old); presentation of stereotypes of a multi-generational family and mutual care traditional for Russian culture, as well as formation of new stereotypes of active, joyful and happy old age.