3. Writing as a special kind of speech activity

Writing is a type of speech, along with oral and internal, and includes writing and reading.

The most complete and thorough psychological and psycholinguistic characteristics of the written form of speech are presented in the studies of L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, L.S. Tsvetkova, A.A. Leontiev et al. (45, 146, 148, 244). In the theory and methodology of speech therapy, a psycholinguistic analysis of the processes of reading and writing, which constitute the written form of the realization of speech activity, is presented in the works of R.I. Lalaeva, G.V. Babina, Su. Gorbunova (140, 179, etc.).

Written language, by its communicative nature, is primarily monologic speech. Such it is “in its origin”, although in the modern history of human society, the dialogical versions of speech communication in writing were fairly widespread (primarily due to such a unique media of communication as Internet communication through computer communication).

The history of the development of writing shows that written speech is a specific “artificial memory of a person” and originated from primitive mnemonic signs.

At some point in the history of mankind, people began to write down information, their thoughts in a certain constant way. The methods changed, and the goal - preservation (“fixation”) of information, its communication to other people (in conditions when speech communication through “live” speech communication is impossible) remained unchanged. The beginning of the development of the letter rests on the auxiliary means. Thus, in the ancient Mayan state, for the maintenance of chronicles, for the preservation of information from the life of the state and other information, nodular records, the so-called “qwipu”, were widely developed.

The development of writing activity in the history of mankind passed through a series of landmark periods.

First, for the "written" communication, drawings-symbols ("pictograms" ) were used, later, by simplification and generalization, turned into ideograms, which are, in fact, the first written characters. For the first time such a letter was created by the Assyrians. This way of writing clearly symbolized the general thought of speech, since each sign (ideogram) used in it “designated” a whole phrase or a separate speech statement. Later, the ideograms were “transformed” into hieroglyphs, which meant a whole word. Over time, on the basis of them were created signs, which are a combination of characters-letters; This type of letter - syllabic (syllable) letter - originated in Egypt and Asia Minor (Ancient Phenicia). And only a few centuries later, on the basis of summarizing the experience of writing thoughts, ideas and other information, an alphabetic letter appears (from the Greek letters Aire - “alpha” and “beta”), in which one letter indicates one sound; This letter was created in ancient Greece.

Thus, the development of the letter went in the direction of moving away from the imagery and approaching the sounding speech. At first, the letter developed historically as if independently of oral speech and only later began to be mediated by it.

Modern writing is alphabetic; in it, the sounds of oral speech are denoted by certain letters. (True, such a relationship - “sound-letter” - does not exist in all modern languages.) For example, in English, Greek or Turkish, the oral “speech modality” is very different from the written one. This fact already speaks of the complex relationship between writing and oral speech: they are closely linked, but this “speech unity” includes significant differences. Multidimensional relations of written and oral speech were the subject of study of many domestic scientists - AR. Luria, B.G. Ananeva, R.E. Levina, R.I. Lalaeva, L.S. Tsvetkova and others (115, 148, 243, and others)

Despite the fact that written language arose and developed as a specific form of displaying the content of oral speech (with the help of specially designed graphic signs), at the present stage of socio-historical development it has become an independent and largely “self-sufficient” type of human speech activity.

Written monologue speech can appear in various forms: in the form of a written message, report, written narration, written expression of thought in the form of reasoning, etc. In all these cases, the structure of written speech is sharply different from the structure of oral dialogical or oral monologue speech (95, 146, 148).

First, written monologic speech is speech without an interlocutor, its motive and intention (in the typical version) are completely determined by the subject of speech activity. If the motive of writing is a social contact or desire, any requirement, then the writer must imagine the mentally to whom he refers, present his reaction to his message. The peculiarity of writing is that the whole process of control over written speech remains within the intellectual activity of the writer himself, without correction of the letter or reading by the addressee. But in cases where a written speech is aimed at clarifying a concept (“concept”), it does not have any interlocutor, the person writes only in order to understand the idea, to translate his idea “into speech form” without any mental contact with the person to whom the message is addressed (317, 322).

Most clearly the differences in oral and written speech are manifested in the psychological content of these processes. S.L. Rubinstein (187), comparing these two types of speech, wrote that oral speech is most often situational speech (largely determined by the situation of verbal communication). This “situationality” of speech is determined by a number of factors: first, in colloquial speech, it is caused by the presence of a general situation that creates a context within which the transmission and reception of information is greatly simplified. Secondly, oral speech has a number of emotional and expressive means that facilitate the process of communication, make more accurate and economical transmission and reception of information; Non-verbal signs of speech activity - gestures, facial expressions, pausing, voice intonation - also create the situationality of oral speech. Thirdly, in oral speech there are a number of means that depend on the motivational sphere and directly or indirectly represent a manifestation of common mental and speech activity.

“Writing,” pointed out A.R. Luria - has almost no extra-lingual, additional means of expression "(148, p. 270). By its structure, written speech is always a speech in the absence of the interlocutor. Those means of coding thoughts in a speech statement that occur in oral speech without awareness are here the subject of conscious action. Since written language does not have any extra-linguistic means (gestures, facial expressions, intonation), it must have sufficient grammatical completeness, and only this grammatical completeness allows you to make the written message sufficiently understandable.

Writing does not imply either the obligatory knowledge of the addressee of the subject of speech (the situation being displayed), nor the “sympathetic” (within the framework of joint activities) contact of the “sender” and “addressee”; play the role of "semantic (semantic) markers" in monologue oral speech. As a partial substitution of these latter, there may be techniques for highlighting individual elements of the stated text in italics or paragraphs. Thus, all information expressed in writing should be based only on a sufficiently complete use of the developed grammatical means of the language (113, 148, 243).

Based on this, written language is as synsemantic as possible (contextually “semantically filled”), and the language (lexical and grammatical) means that it uses should be adequate to express the content of the message being transmitted. In this case, the writer must build his message so that the reader can go all the way back from the expanded, external speech to the inner meaning, the main idea of ​​the stated text (148, 216).

The process of understanding written language differs sharply from the process of understanding oral speech in that it is always possible to re-read it, that is, return arbitrarily to all the links included in it, which is almost impossible when understanding oral speech. [133]

Another significant difference between the psychological structure of writing and oral speech is connected with the fact of a completely different “origin” of both types of speech during ontogenesis. L.S. Vygotsky wrote that written speech, having a close connection with oral speech, nevertheless, in the most significant features of its development, does not at all repeat the history of the development of oral speech. “Writing is not also a simple translation of oral speech into written signs, and mastering written language is not just mastering the technique of writing” (45, p. 236).

As indicated by A.R. Luria, oral speech is formed in the process of natural communication between a child and an adult, which was previously “sympathetic” [134] and only then becomes a special, independent form of oral speech communication. “However, it always preserves elements of a connection with a practical situation, gesture and mimicry. Writing has a completely different origin and a different psychological structure "(148, p. 271). If oral speech occurs in a child in the 2nd year of life, then the letter is formed only in the 6th-7th year. While oral speech arises directly in the process of communication with adults, written speech is formed only in the process of regular conscious learning (133, 266, etc.).

Motivation for writing also arises in the child later than the motives of oral speech. It is well known from teaching practice that it is rather difficult to create motives for writing in a child of senior preschool age, because he can do without it (142, 244).

Writing appears only as a result of special training, which begins with the conscious mastering of all means of expressing thought in writing. At the early stages of the formation of written speech, its subject is not so much the thought that is to be expressed, as those technical means of writing letters, and then words that have never been the subject of awareness in oral, dialogical or monologue speech. At the first stage of mastering written language, the main subject of attention and intellectual analysis are technical operations of writing and reading; the child develops the motor skills of writing and the skills of a “tracing” gaze when reading. “A child who learns to write, at first, operates not so much with thoughts, as with the means of their external expression, the ways of designating sounds, letters and words. It is only much later that the expression of thoughts becomes the object of the child’s conscious actions ”(148, p. 271).

Such "auxiliary", intermediate operations of the process of speech generation, such as the operation of extracting phonemes from the sound stream, the image of these phonemes by a letter, the synthesis of letters into a word, the successive transition from one word to another, never fully understood in oral speech, remain in writing in writing for a long time the subject of the child’s conscious actions. Only after writing is automated, these conscious actions turn into unconscious operations and begin to occupy the place that similar operations (sound extraction, finding articulation, etc.) occupy in oral speech (113, 244).

Thus, the conscious analysis of the means of written expression of thought becomes one of the essential psychological characteristics of writing.

Based on the above, it becomes obvious that written speech requires abstraction for its development. Compared with oral speech, it is doubly abstract: first, the child must abstract from sensual, sounding and spoken speech, and secondly, he must turn to abstract speech, which does not use words, but "representations of words." The fact that written speech (in the internal plan) “is thought, not pronounced, represents one of the main distinguishing features of these two types of speech and a significant difficulty in the formation of written speech” (244, p. 153).

Such a characteristic of written activity makes it possible to consider oral and written speech as two levels within the framework of the language (linguistic) and psychological structure of human speech activity. X. Jackson considered writing and understanding written as manipulation of "symbols of characters." The use of oral speech, by LS. Vygotsky, requires primary symbols, and the letter - secondary, in connection with which he defined the written activity as a symbolic activity of the second level, an activity that uses "symbols of characters" (45, 244).

In this regard, written speech includes a number of levels or phases that are absent in oral speech. Thus, written speech includes a number of phonemic-level processes — the search for individual sounds, their opposition, the coding of individual sounds into letters, the combination of individual sounds and letters into whole words. To a much greater extent than it does in oral speech, it includes in its composition and lexical level, consisting in the selection of words, in the search for suitable necessary verbal expressions, with opposing them to other "lexical alternatives" (variants of the verbal designation of an object). In addition, written speech includes in its composition and conscious operations of the syntactic level, “which most often proceeds automatically, unconsciously in oral speech, but which constitutes one of the essential links in writing” (148, p. 272). In his writing activity, a person deals with the conscious construction of a phrase, which is mediated not only by the existing speech skills, but also by the rules of grammar and syntax.

Writing is fundamentally different from oral speech in that it can only be done according to the rules of “expanded (explicit) grammar” necessary to make the content of written speech understandable in the absence of accompanying speech utterances and intonations. A significant role is also played by the lack of knowledge of the subject of speech by the addressee. This is manifested, in particular, in the fact that those ellipses and grammatical incompleteness, which are possible, and often justified in oral speech, become completely unacceptable in writing (45, 148, 271, etc.).

Written monologue speech in its linguistic form of the expression "is always a complete, grammatically organized, expanded structure, almost not using forms of direct speech" (148, p. 273). Therefore, the length of the phrase in writing, as a rule, significantly exceeds the length of the phrase in oral speech. In expanded writing, complex forms of "grammatical" control are used, for example, the inclusion of subordinate clauses, which are rarely found in oral speech.

Thus, written speech is a special speech process, this speech is a monologue, conscious and arbitrary, “contextual” in its content and selectively “linguistic” in terms of its implementation.

Based on a comprehensive psychological analysis of written speech by L.S. Tsvetkova (244, etc.) identifies a number of its distinctive features:

• Writing (PR) is generally much more arbitrary than oral communication. Already sound form, which is automated in oral speech, when learning to write, requires dismemberment, analysis and synthesis. The syntax of the phrase in writing is as arbitrary as its phonetics.

• PR is a conscious activity that is closely related to conscious intention. Signs of language and their use in writing are assimilated by the child consciously and deliberately, unlike the unconscious (or not sufficiently conscious) use and assimilation of them in oral speech.

• Writing is a kind of “algebra of speech, the most difficult and complex form of intentional and conscious speech activity.” [135]

There are also significant differences in the functions of written and oral speech (if we speak about the general functions of speech) (45, 148, 266, etc.).

- Oral speech usually performs the function of speaking in a conversation situation, and written speech is more business, scientific, etc., it serves to transfer the content to the absent interlocutor.

- Compared with oral speech, writing and reading as a means of communication are not completely independent, in relation to oral speech, they act as an auxiliary tool.

- The functions of writing, although very broad, but, nevertheless, narrower than the functions of oral speech. The main functions of writing are to ensure the transfer of information at any distance, ensuring the possibility of fixing the content of oral speech and information in time. These properties of writing are infinitely pushing the limits of human development.