Educational reading practice (based on studying Dostoyevsky's works in secondary school)

Abstract

The relevance of the research is determined by finding the reasons for modern schoolchildren's decline in the motivation for reading in general and classical literature, in particular. According to the authors, the change in the semiosis of culture (change of the verbal code by a visual one), as well as the rigidity of the organization of reading practices in teaching, can be named among the circumstances that cause the reading crisis. In this context, the “golden pool” of the Russian literature is facing the threat of losing its culturegenerating potential. Goal: a critical analysis of the practice of organizing the reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel “Crime and Punishment” in secondary schools; highlighting its basic constituents and hidden actions that program the students' perception; identifying the directions of re-actualization of a classical literary text potential in school teaching. Objectives: the reconstruction of student and pedagogical discourse positions that objectify a literary work; a comparative analysis of educational dispositions; highlighting the discursive constituents of educational reading practices; identifying the directions of their renovation that make students' interest in reading a literary text more active. Methods of research: a critical discourse analysis; a conversion analysis; a pragmatic interpretation; survey methods (interviews, a focus group, experts' opinions). There have been found significant gaps in the dispositions of participants in educational reading, the presence of which is masked by common procedures of compulsion to communicative consent. Established were the key constituents of these practices (authorization, decontextualization, deactualization), which reduce the text of a literary work to the teacher's statements and the text in the textbook, which substitute the reading activity by a pseudo-literary replication. Substantiated is the didactic necessity of limiting the range of students' everyday experience actions of their educational interaction with an artifact text, alongside with developing a set of readers' new competencies based on the activation of perceptual-figurative parameters of a literary work perception and students' independent comprehension of the text. There have been established discursive operations of educational recontextualization (transformation into an academic subject) of the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's literary works, the objectification and reorganization of which will contribute to the growth of the generativeness of educational relations and increase their cultural-generating effectiveness based on links with the text-artifact. The general orientation of the subject “Russian Literature” towards the assimilation of methodologically codified material by students, which produces both the unification of the literary works being studied and the despecification of the cultural contributions of their authors, as well as the leveling of the individual character of the perception literary works by students, was critically assessed. Particular attention is drawn to the compulsion to communicative agreement (given the pedagogical perspective) in an educational interaction, which hampers a critical analysis of the text by school students, as well as the formation of a variety of reading practices. The optimization of the situation in teaching is consistent with the limitation of the literary component in studying the classical literary heritage, as well as with the expansion of the intermediary resource of visualization in relations with the text-artifact, and, above all, the activation of the ecphrasic dimension of reading a literary work.