Child speech development after language self-study

Completion of the stage of self-study of the language coincides with the child with the most important milestone in his biography - with the arrival in school. This event changes his life drastically. The central activity now is becoming an educational activity. From a carefree creature a little man turns into a schoolboy, designed to master knowledge in a fairly rigidly compiled school curriculum. Speech, a verbal-logical form of learning, gradually becomes his main way of understanding the world. And in this process language becomes the main mechanism of knowledge. Acquiring a child’s language can be compared to acquiring a personal computer. However, having received a “language computer” at its disposal, the becoming individual does not yet know all the rules for its operation. These rules, this “software”, he will have to discover for himself in his further speech practice.

The main thing that gives the child language is the ability to generate and understand diverse speech works. In the words of N. I. Zhinkin, he "goes into plaintext as an astronaut into space." The peculiarity of the structure of texts (discourses) that a person produces allows one to judge the individual characteristics of his language personality, the originality of his verbal thinking, etc. In other words, the structure of discourse is a reflection (and expression) of features of a language personality, and the improvement of speech activity on the production of texts will reflect the evolution of its communicative competence.

For the first time, a child encounters the need to create texts as early as preschool age: as early as 3-4 years old he begins to combine sentences into small speech works. However, the discourses of children of this age may be called connected texts with a sufficient degree of conditionality: preschoolers' speech is situational, it is replete with non-verbal components and sound gestures, demonstrative and personal pronouns, deictic adverbs (here, here, there); the sentences that make up the preschooler's message are connected with the situations depicted in speech, not with the preceding context, etc. Even first-graders do not yet have the laws for constructing coherent speech works.

The development of the language structure of the child continues even after the completion of the stage of self-study of the language. Now, however, this process is much more slow; he has the character of perfection, polishing of already acquired language knowledge. Mastering a native language at a schoolchild takes place under the sign of discourse. This is manifested at all levels of the language structure. The improvement of phonetics now has the character of mastering the intricacies of the intonation design of the whole speech message, transmission of various semantic shades, intonational allocations of another word, etc. The formation of grammar again appears as mastering the grammar of the text - grammatical ways of combining sentences into super-phrasal unity and holistic speech works.

At school age, the development of the child’s language and semantic language continues. This finds expression not only in increasing the volume of the dictionary, but also in the qualitative improvement of its system. Describing the formation of the student's lexical system, first of all, it is necessary to point out the process of the continuing development in his speech of the generalizing function of the word. In class, the child is confronted with elements of scientific terminology, abstract vocabulary, not directly related to specific subjects. The development of discursive thinking, the mastery of verbal-logical operations of the withdrawal of new knowledge encourage the student to operate on a system of concepts in which a particular lexeme is perceived in hierarchical relations.

A simple illustration of the above position will be a description of the experiment using the method of determining the

tia. Experiments of this kind consist in the task of giving a description of the meaning of a word, for example, "dog" or "table." There are two types of answers when performing experiments.

1. “A dog - it bites and barks”, “The dog protects the house” “You can write a hundred behind it”, “A table, there is a writing table”, and so on.

2. “A dog is an animal that has four paws, fur and tail”, “A table is furniture”, etc.

In the first type of answers, the child cannot yet abstract away from the specific situation in which the subject enters. This is not a definition of the concept, but a reproduction of one of the attributes of the subject. The second type of answers is based on a completely different principle: here a person enters the object being defined into the system of concepts, assigns it to a certain category. Here we have a higher level of communicative competence, which relies on verbal-logical thinking. Experiments have shown that preschool children are dominated by the answers of the first type. In younger schoolchildren, along with the first type of answers, one can observe another, with a higher degree of generalization. For older students, the second type of answers prevails, which indicates an increase in the level of communicative competence.

At school age, the child continues to master the metaphorical and idiomatic richness of the native language: the active use of the schoolchild includes an increasing number of phraseological units, vivid metaphors, and figurative expressions. Along with the expansion of social experience of the becoming individual, the formation of associative links in her linguistic consciousness, which are increasingly reflect the national linguistic picture of the world, and on the other, they acquire the character of an individual thesaurus.

After the completion of the self-learning of the language, the nature of children's word creation also changes fundamentally. The invention of new words is now acquiring the character of a conscious principle of stylistic speech decoration. From the unconscious word-making, the schoolchild moves on to the language game (we already talked about it in the previous section of the book). An example of such a game is the playful creation of eleven-year-old adolescents of the nihilists-electricians party (nihilists from — all the same; electricians — everything is like a damn).

Mastering the structure of discourse, the various ways of its construction, is in direct connection with the development

thinking and expanding the social outlook of the student. At school, the child from figurative forms of thinking moves to speech thinking, the highest manifestation of which is discursive (discursive) thinking. The main stimulus and indicator of the formation of the linguistic personality is now becoming the ability of the student to create holistic speech works. The well-known Russian linguist G. I. Bogin outlined the levels of evolution of a linguistic personality by its ability to produce and understand texts. The scientist identified five such levels. Let us briefly describe each of them.

Level 1, called the level of correctness by the researcher. About him who has not achieved it can be said: "He does not know the Russian language." The preschool child says: "Mom was at home, dad was at work." The linguistic personality, having risen to this level, masters precisely this language with its elementary rules. The required level corresponds to the speech development of a six-year-old child.

Up to level 2, the level of interiorization, they say about a person: “He hasn’t yet learned how to speak.” The disadvantage here is “bad speed” associated with a poorly formed apparatus of internal speech, for example: the older preschooler says: “Mom went there, and I ... mom went ... mom went there, there was a kitten, three kittens ... mom I went there, I was alone, there were cats, three kittens ... and someone else's aunt came ... then ”: Overcoming these kind of shortcomings is quite achieved by the teenage age of 10-11 years.

To level 3, the level of saturation, the shortcomings are criticized by judgments like: “He has a poor speech.” There is a weak use of language style resources, for example: a) a schoolchild in writing describes the beginning of the novel Mother: “There was a factory in this city. Workers worked at the plant. Workers did not like this plant. They didn’t like the works either. ” Overcoming the weakness of this kind lasts up to 15-16 years of age. It is good if during this period a high school student strives for the differentiated use of language means of all the sublanguages ​​he knows.

The last two levels are correlated not so much with age characteristics, as with the level of general and speech culture of a language personality.

If level 4, the level of adequate choice, is not reached, we can say: “He speaks the wrong words.” An example of this type of error: “Yesterday I march it to the bathhouse” (the interlocutor criticizes the speaker for the misuse of the word “march”). Having risen to the 4th level, the linguistic personality becomes the “master of the means of expression,” that is, rhetorical abilities to build their speech in accordance with various situations of communication.

Level 5, the level of adequate synthesis, with the mastery of which the linguistic person gets the opportunity in everyday communication to achieve effects that are considered the prerogative of the language of fiction.

Formation of discursive thinking becomes the central content of the evolution of communicative competence. At the same time, if the first six years of development of a linguistic personality proceed as a process of self-learning for a language, after its completion, the person’s thought-and-developmental development should take place in conditions of special education in school. One of the important components of such training becomes the mastery of the person literacy.