Mastering written language and the formation of language personality

Formation of writing in children includes the acquisition of writing and reading skills. It is very important to understand that mastering literacy affects the formation of the linguistic personality as a whole. This is not just the acquisition of new speech skills; This is a kind of revolution in the ways of speech formation and perception. According to psychologists, in the linguistic consciousness of a literate person there are two standards, a kind of two language systems - oral (sound) and written (literal). The written language is represented by three sign systems (uppercase, lowercase, typed), which in many cases are graphically different from each other. Having mastered the literacy, the child must master a set of rules for the transition from one system of symbols to another (from the sound “language to the written language), called spelling.

Russian spelling is based on several basic principles: phonetic, morphological (phonemic) and traditional. The phonetic principle of graphics is “write how you hear,” that is, the spelling is close to pronunciation. Tradi-

The rational principle retains the historically old spelling of words that does not correspond to modern pronunciation (vocabulary words). However, the basic principle on which modern Russian writing is based is morphological (phonemic). It consists in the fact that when writing, the constancy of the alphabetic designation of morphemes (roots, prefixes, suffixes, endings) is maintained regardless of the change in their pronunciation. The morphological principle is based on the phonological theory of the Moscow phonological school.

Writing as a kind of speech activity is very different from speech verbally by a number of psychological characteristics. First of all, this is speech in the absence of the interlocutor. The transmitted text should contain all the information necessary for the reader to fully understand the meaning. The whole process of control over the written speech remains within the activities of the writer himself, without correction by the listener. Written discourse is structured in such a way that the speaker has almost no additional non-verbal means of expression. There is no knowledge of the addressee's communication situation, there is no visual contact, which makes it possible to use facial expressions, gestures, intonation, pauses (their partial substitution in writing becomes the means of a paragraph-phraseics-punctuation and other graphic selections). All information expressed in writing should rely mainly on the rather complete use of the expanded grammatical means of the language. Firstly, these are phonemic, level processes, the content of which is the search for correspondence between sound and letter, encoding of sound into letters, making words from letters. Secondly, these are word-picking operations (lexical level), the search for suitable expressions, etc. Finally, this is a conscious reference to grammar — the linguistic laws for the construction of coherent speech — the choice of grammatical forms adequate to the tasks of combining words into syntactic structures. At the same time, the operations of constructing phrases that the speaker did automatically in the situation of oral speech, when creating written texts, require an understanding of the rules of morphology and syntax.

If oral speech is formed in a child in the process of natural communication with adults, then written speech appears as a result of special training, in which he first learns

There are technical means of writing letters and words which then (much later) become a means of expressing thoughts. It is necessary to emphasize once again that written speech (as opposed to oral) is initially a conscious arbitrary action, in which the means of expression are the main subject of activity.

A very important feature of writing becomes the possibility of correction, editing the created text. It is based on the possibility of repeated reference to what has already been written and provides conscious control over the course of speech-thinking operations. The possibility of refining, practicing the formalization of thought into a text, an increased degree of awareness of the speech acts performed - all this makes writing a powerful factor in the development of discursive thinking. It is important to understand that together with mastering the skills of working with written and printed texts, the whole linguistic consciousness of a person is restructured: from the skills of situational, in addition to (unconscious) communication, it proceeds to the assimilation of conscious operations of extra-creative (contextual) speech activity based on textual (discursive) speech thinking.

The formation of the spelling of the child devoted a significant number of works of psychologists and teachers. However, most of them affect the formation of the technical skill of writing, that is, spelling, and not written speech as a kind of means of communication. L. Vygotsky pointed out the fallacy of this practice. “Schoolchildren,” wrote our distinguished compatriot, “teach not writing, but writing words, and, to a large degree, therefore, learning to write does not rise above the level of traditional law and penmanship.” The scientist drew an analogy between teaching literacy and teaching music, in which a student is taught to read notes, develop his fingers fluency, the ability to hit the keys, etc., but he is not introduced at all into the element of music as art. “Learning [of writing],” Vygotsky noted, “should be put so that reading and writing for something the child needs.” The letter must be meaningful for the child, must be caused by a natural need, need be included in a vital for a child task. Only then can we be sure that it will develop.

in a child, not as a habit of hands and fingers, but as a truly new and complex kind of speech. ”

The thoughts expressed by Vygotsky in the 1930s have not lost their relevance in our days. Literacy is still considered to be the main (and often the only) criterion of students' success in Russian language lessons. As stated in a conversation with one of the authors of the book, the young Russian teacher said: “My main task is that they [children] are literate, so that at least they wrote a job application without mistakes; Let them be bored now, but then they will thank me. ” Of course, knowledge of the spelling rules is a good thing, and in general is necessary for a cultured person. But the identification of knowledge of the Russian language and knowledge of the rules of spelling, which has now become a component of the ordinary metalinguistic consciousness, can harm the developing language personality.

The phenomenon of deification (sacralization) of spelling norms, implanted in the domestic school practice, was named by a famous linguist, Professor N. D. Golev orthograph-centrism. “For more than a century,” writes the scientist, “the Russian nations voluntarily or unwittingly imposed spelling-centrist ideas about the Russian language, in which an equal sign is put between the spelling and the Russian language, <...> Many other, much more important, sections of the Russian language course and Speech cultures, in essence, occupy a peripheral place in school; <..:> Orthographic centrism is perceived as a presumption of linguistic thinking not only among ordinary Russian users. Officials from enlightenment (as well as many teachers, methodologists, and even scientists <...>) - all of them are “schoolchildren” of our school, who remember how they were taught in Russian lessons without mistakes ".

Orthographic centrism makes Russian lessons the most boring lessons, it discourages learning the secrets of communication, communication between people. Instead of fluency in the laws of writing written texts of various styles and genres, which allow expressing any meaningful meaning in writing, orthographic centrism implants a type of neurosis — a phobia (fear) before writing, thereby crippling and disfiguring the consciousness of a linguistic personality.