Fiction as it should be read. How to teach reading fiction, or a philological approach to literary text

Claims that this is exactly the amount of time needed to master any skill of any kind. This rule has several consequences:

Because it takes so long - three hours a day for ten years - one person can become a master in a very limited number of areas.
Since time is the same for everyone, it is impossible to speed up the process of development. If you have mastered something new and your competitor has not, you have a serious advantage.
The task of mastering any field of activity seems difficult, so people often give up. For every virtuoso violinist there is great amount people who quit after just a few lessons, or who never even started.

When working on a startup, it's important to learn a lot of different things. A startup member must understand programming, interface development, product strategy, sales, marketing, and hiring staff. Failure in one of these disciplines can mean failure of the entire company. For example, if you don't hire good team, then the startup will not have the resources to implement its plans, regardless of the quality of the plans themselves. Or the product may be useful, but not very user-friendly or beautiful, in which case it usually has a hard time getting to the top.

What if you need to master all the necessary areas, but mastering them takes too much time?

I want to propose the “100 hour rule”:

For most disciplines, a hundred hours of active study is enough to begin to understand them much better than a beginner.

Eg:

• Cooking to become a chef takes years to learn, but one hundred hours of cooking, lessons, practice, and practice will make you a better cook than most you know.
• In programming, it takes years to become a strong programmer, but taking a couple of courses from Codecademy or Udacity will turn you into a programmer capable of creating many fairly simple applications.
• Becoming a great salesperson takes several years, but with a little reading key books and by shadowing experienced salespeople, you can learn enough to avoid common, dangerous sales mistakes.

I experienced the sales example myself. Before I became a venture capitalist, I was a programmer for ten years. I had never interacted with sales and knew nothing about it. When I got into investing, I learned that most companies' bottlenecks were sales, marketing, and user acquisition, not technology. As a result, I began self-teaching myself in sales and related fields. I read books like Traction and attended conferences like SalesConf. I spent 50-100 hours on this. And as a result, even if I am not comparable to an experienced salesperson, I have learned much more about sales than people who do not do it know. For example, I now know that most software should be priced based on its value to the user rather than the cost of development. What is better to talk about the benefits than the possibilities. And what is most important in sales is to listen to the desires of users, and not tell them about what you have. A professional seller would have concluded deals with 80% of potential buyers, a novice would probably have concluded deals with about 10%. I think I would give 30-40% in this case. Far from an expert, but also far from a beginner. Not a bad return on investment of a couple of weeks in training.

A few observations regarding the “one hundred hour rule”:

• 100, although a round number, is an approximation. In some areas, 10-20 hours will be enough to achieve average competency, while others may require several hundred hours. But in any case, much less than the 10,000 hours required to achieve mastery.
• The 10,000 hour rule is based on absolute knowledge—that's how long it takes to learn absolutely everything about an area. The one hundred hour rule, on the other hand, is based on relative knowledge. 95% of people know nothing about most areas of knowledge, so it is very easy to move from the category of the naive 95% to the category of the 96th percent. The main and longest part of the path lies precisely in the interval from 96% to 99.9%
• Just like the 10,000 hour rule, you need to study actively and thoroughly. You don't just skim through a book or mindlessly repeat the movements of a technique—you read and practice specifically to learn and improve your skills.

Getting back to startups: make a list of things your company needs to succeed at (sales, programming, interface development, domain knowledge, etc.). If you lack experience in any of these areas, don't brush it off and hope for the best. Invest a little time in it to gain basic knowledge and confidence so that you don’t put obstacles in your way when doing typical mistakes newcomers. In the future, you will need to hire experts. But in current situation you need to invest enough time in acquiring knowledge so that you can fill existing gaps in the project with it.

What do the following have in common?

• Composer Mozart,
• Grandmaster Bobby Fischer,
• The founder of S.M. Bill Joy
• Music group "The Beatles"
• Bill Gates???

Possible answers:

1. They are all members of a secret enclave, representatives of a special nation,
2. They are very successful people, each in his own field;
3. They are adherents of a special esoteric cult;
4. They all paid for theirs: 10 thousand man hours. They all went through a ten thousand hour journey to success!!!

Malcolm Gladwell and scientists Erickson & Co.

Speaking about the 10 thousand hours rule, one cannot fail to mention the good popularizer of science M. Gladwell. What does popularizer mean? Gladwell is very good writer, who took (takes) scientific research and presented to the public in a convenient visual form, for which the public gave him fame and fees of millions of dollars. Erickson and co. are the official source of such scientific research in this case.

10,000 hour rule

The 10,000 hour rule goes like this:

“To achieve success in a certain field of activity, you need to spend 10 thousand hours on such activity!”

To be a pro, but not the best: you need 8 thousand man-hours.

To be mediocre, “on topic”: 4,000 hours.

An amateur, an amateur, will spend 2000 hours.

Important clarification: you need to spend time not on studying the activity, but on the practical side of the matter!

Circumstantial evidence ruled for 10 thousand hours

• All of the above celebrities proved this with data from their biography.
• An academician receives an academic title, a world-class master becomes recognized, geniuses gain fame - after 10,000 hours of relevant work. (By scientific research the same scientist Erickson and neurologist Daniel Levitin).
• Who will you entrust your health into the hands of: a doctor who has recently received his diploma, or a gray-haired old man whose hands have been patched daily for half a century human hearts? The answer is obvious!

Why is this so? The path to success in 10k hours steps?

Of course, it’s sad that the path to success is hard, difficult and time-consuming. You won’t be able to lie down today and get up tomorrow already famous, rich, or something else with the word “super.”

1. All researchers in the field of psychology, neuroscience and education indicate that a person is physically incapable of rapid changes, both physiologically and psychologically. (mastery of skills is always change)

2. The brain grows with learning in a special way, and it needs time (neural networks grow in sleep).

3. When there is a load on the consciousness, it may appear; if there is an underload, there will be no effect.

4. On average, a person can work productively from 6 to 8 hours.

5. Natural needs and all others must also be taken into account.

In fact, you can mathematically calculate how much time a person needs to learn “his topic” from A to Z. Perhaps there is already such a formula, buried in the boring and dry works of scientists. Then it’s worth waiting for the popularizers to dig it up and put it on public display.

Let's count our path to success in hours

Finally, The path to success is equal to 10 thousand steps in practical activity. What does it mean? (taking into account physical human limitations)

for a better look: right click, open image + ctr

From the table: the conclusions suggest themselves, I underlined these conclusions with a yellow (golden) marker, go for it!!!

P.S. The other day I was reading a bestselling author, and he clearly expressed that success began to come to him through the 10,000 articles he wrote. So, I only have nothing left: 9,783 articles... I won’t waste time while you read and comment on this post...

But anyone who has mastered the skill of speed reading well enough will tell you with confidence -

What speed reading is a complex skill.

Speed ​​reading is not just quickly putting letters into words and words into sentences. And this is not reading diagonally. This skill implies that a person has several skills:

1. Has a wide angle of view.
2. Doesn't speak the text.
3. Able to concentrate.
4. Possesses imaginative thinking.
5. Reads only forward, without backtracking.
6. Reinforces what has been read.

Here is the point: the information given below will be useful to you only if you think that you need it - read fiction fast. If you have the attitude “if only it were possible to read fiction quickly, I would love to learn,” then these tips are for you. But, if you think that “what an utter heresy to read fiction quickly!” - as Ford said, “you’re right.”

You can walk and have fun, or you can drive a sports car and also have fun. And you can do it equally well. It’s just that walking is a little more familiar, but to “drive” you need to practice.

So, a comprehensive speed reading skill. What you can do to read even more good books:

1. Increase the angle of view

If you have a wide perspective, you can read both self-education books and novels faster.

Some people have one word in their field of vision, others two. Less often - 3-4. But there are those who read in sentences and paragraphs. Yes, just like that - I looked at the paragraph and realized what was written. And moreover, he presented it in all its glory and remembered it in detail. Because the visual angle is large and lateral peripheral vision is developed. This can be trained. In I described how to do this using Schulte tables.

2. Learn to read without pronouncing

The playing time of the audiobook “Smilla and Her Sense of Snow” is 27 hours. Thus, if you spell everything out, you need to spend 27 hours to read this detective story. I read it in 4.

If you want to save dozens of hours, learn to read without internal pronunciation.

The reading process ordinary person goes like this:

Saw - Spoke - Heard - Understood

And so - for a person who has speed reading skills:

I saw - I understood

It happens that I stop and pronounce some word that seems unusual, new, interesting. But reading every word like this is not a rational waste of time. And in order to feel all the beauty of language, to immerse yourself in beautiful pictures and to receive aesthetic pleasure, it is not at all necessary to read a book to yourself. You can understand it immediately. And at any time you can return to normal reading with pronunciation.

Eat simple exercises in order to learn to read without articulation:

1. While reading the text, do not pronounce the words, but count their number. Read one page this way. Retell what you managed to remember.
2. As you read, count to yourself from nine to one. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, nine, … . Counting continuously, read one page. Retell what you managed to remember.

3. Concentrate on the text

The time we think we spend reading is often spent on the following thought processes:

• reading;
• reproducing the plot in the head;
• analysis of what is read;
• fantasizing (thinking out, inventing);
• replaying past life events;
• planning.

Anyone who has mastered the skill of speed reading is entirely focused on the first three points and does it simultaneously. At the moment of reading, a person plays the plot in his head and analyzes it. Simultaneously. It's entirely in the book. Note - not in your thoughts, but in the book.

The “Point of Concentration” exercise will help you develop this skill.

Focus point

The point of concentration is at the back of the head where it is convex.

Close your eyes. Make sure to breathe deeply. Exhale a little slower than you inhale. Exhalation is a relaxation reflex. Once you feel relaxed while observing your breathing, place your fingertips on that same spot on the back of your head. Be aware of touch. With each inhalation, concentrate very intensely on this touch to the back of your head. As you exhale, concentrate on letting your shoulders drop.

Imagine picking up an imaginary golf ball. You run your fingers over it wavy surface. Estimate the weight of this imaginary golf ball in your hand. Now mentally place it on the back of your head. To do this, move your hand to this point again. Imagine that you remove your hand again, and the ball seems to magically remain in that place. As you inhale, concentrate intensely on that golf ball, and as you exhale, concentrate intensely on letting your shoulders drop. Open your eyes and start reading.

Around here is the point of concentration.

4. Develop imaginative thinking

Speed ​​reading is not only speed, but also the depth of absorbed text. For those who read quickly, images also arise quickly. And most importantly, these images are very clear and vivid even for abstract concepts.

After completing the courses quick reading many note that reading is similar to watching interesting film with all the characters, events, scenes that are described.

Try this next time you read a book:

1. Clearly understand the meaning of the word, its meaning.
2. Mentally select an image for each word.
3. Make the sounds louder and the picture brighter. Let it be an exciting 3D action, not letters on a page.
4. Be aware of what emotions, sensations and feelings correspond to each word.

Each time you will start your imaginative thinking easier and faster.

5. Read only forward, no backtracking

Returning to what has already been read can be for two reasons. Or you fly into the clouds and start thinking about something completely different from what is written in the book. Simply put, you get distracted. Or I wanted to try the idea because I liked it. And this can happen both when reading non-fiction literature and literary texts.

Regarding distractions, see point 3. And regarding the so-called conscious stops and returns, I can say that there is still no need to return to what you have already read. You need to train your brain to grasp everything from the first reading. At first this may seem very unusual. But very quickly the brain will get used to this way of reading. A pointer will help you get rid of backward movements.

Tony Buzan experiment

Imagine an ideal circle half a meter in diameter at a distance of 30-40 centimeters from your eyes directly in front of you. Outline it slowly with your eyes. If someone were watching you, he would say that the trajectory of your eyes is broken and spasmodic. Perhaps you have felt this yourself. If you trace this circle with a pointer, the trajectory will be even and smooth.

Eye movement without a pointer and with a pointer.

Exercise with a pointer

When you follow the text with your hand or a pointer, it increases your attentiveness and reading speed and reduces eye strain. The main thing is to follow the rule - the eyes follow the pointer, and not vice versa. Those. you set the speed with your hand, and your eyes only keep up with the movements of your hand. If you feel like your reading speed is slow, just increase the speed of your hand movement.

6. Consolidate what you read

You can consolidate what you read while reading. This is called mental structuring.

Formulate the main idea after reading the chapter. You need to do this as quickly as possible - both reading and summarizing the main ideas very quickly, so that you eventually start doing it in parallel.

You can draw mind maps in your mind - while reading, we draw a plot map on the internal background. You can try first for individual paragraphs: you read the paragraph and record a small mind map in your mind.

Here's what you can do to retain a completely read book in your memory:

1. Retell the text.
2. Write out quotes.
3. Take 10-20 minutes to learn the written quotes.
4. Sit in silence for 15 minutes, think, reflect on the book.
5. Formulate the main idea and conclusions in 3-5 sentences.
6. Write a mini-essay.

All this will give you an excellent opportunity to analyze the text, express your thoughts, realize your feelings, activate your thinking, develop analytical skills and memory.

The brake is in the head. The human brain is accustomed to working quickly. My experience suggests that speed reading is applicable to literary texts. And if you need this skill, you can easily learn it. Do the exercises described in the article and follow the releases of the section to become a super-reader and quickly meet the magnificent, beautiful, smart art books of our and past centuries from your wish-read list.

Fiction and scientific, specialized literature are not the same thing. The perception of a work of art requires special knowledge, skills, and abilities from the reader. Nowadays it is difficult to meet a person who does not read fiction. A work of art is designed to have a huge impact on the individual: to expand the mental horizons, to provide an emotional experience that goes beyond what a person could acquire, to shape artistic taste, deliver aesthetic pleasure.

But the most important thing is that, by forming deep “theoretical” feelings in people, fiction encourages them to think through and direct their real behavior. However, its impact on the individual depends on the depth of perception. Research recent years show that the quality of fiction is still low. The shortcomings in the perception of fiction are numerous and mostly typical. Many readers treat fiction as entertainment; although they read a lot, they read it unsystematically and chaotically. “whatever comes to hand.”

Such a reader, as a rule, perceives the book superficially, only at the level of plot, plot, without giving himself the trouble to think about the author’s reasoning, skipping descriptions of nature, the feelings of the characters, etc. For him, “Anna Karenina” is simply a novel about an unfaithful wife who abandoned under the wheels of a train. With such a perception of fiction, satiety and disappointment in it often sets in, and loss of interest in reading, because plot situations not many and the books seem to repeat them. Readers often approach fiction with the wrong expectations. Such a reader considers a work of fiction, like a scientific book, only a means of information about different sides life. "IN scientific book write about discoveries in the field of technology, medicine, etc.,” he says, “and fiction book shows the life of the people in the old days and the life of our contemporary.” Such readers do not understand the artistic nature of the work - hence the limited assessments of literary works: “Fairy Tale” A little prince“I didn’t like St. Exupery - there is nothing new”; “I read I. Shamyakin’s novel “Heart in the Palm” with interest: for the first time I learned how heart surgery is done.”

Research shows that many readers, both young and adults, do not know how to correctly perceive more or less complex ordinary metaphors, words characteristic of many artists - Y. Olesha, B. Pasternak, etc. And this is one of the reasons that they they refuse to read truly works of fiction or perceive in such books only what allows them to grasp the development of the plot.

Such a reader does not like and does not understand poetry; in his opinion, it can be said about it “normally” - in prose; he doesn't pay attention to artistic features works, the style, language of the writer, he is not impressed by vivid comparisons, metaphors, figurative expressions. By noting the most characteristic shortcomings in the perception of works of art, we wanted to help readers evaluate their own perceptions and see their shortcomings. How to do it? First of all, it is necessary to understand how the perception of a work of art occurs, on what its completeness, depth, and integrity depend.

Fiction reproduces reality in figurative form. A literary artistic image expresses the general in the individual, uniquely specific. The author of a work of art has the right to speculation and creative imagination. Artistic image embodied in the word; imagery and emotionality of style create the richness of language, literary devices etc. The more talented the writer, the more original the style. Style reflects the personality of the writer. You can’t confuse Leskov with Chekhov; you can always recognize the style of Hemingway, Babel, etc. The author of a work of fiction relies on the reader’s ability to recreate the event being described and to empathize with the characters.

A work of art has a strong emotional impact and requires emotional investment. The perception of fiction is a very subtle, complex process, not everything in it is clear to scientists, but some of its patterns have already been identified. As is known, knowledge develops from living contemplation to abstract thinking, and from it to practice. In the perception of fiction, three stages can be distinguished. The first is the direct perception of the work, that is, the reconstruction and experience of its images. As is known, V. G. Belinsky already identified this stage of perception and called it the “stage of delight,” believing that first one must perceive a work with the “heart” and then with the “mind.” Almost all readers go through the first stage of perceiving fiction. The first stage should be followed by a second, higher one - “from living contemplation to abstract thinking” (according to Belinsky - “the stage of true pleasure”).

Abstract thinking does not reduce the emotionality of perception, but deepens it. Not everyone goes through the second phase of perceiving a work of art. Many readers limit themselves to familiarizing themselves with the plot and “swallow” books without any desire to critically comprehend them. The third stage is the influence of a work of art on the reader’s personality. Of course, dividing the perception process into stages is somewhat arbitrary. But it is useful for solving our problem - learning to read fiction, increasing.

Research shows that the gradualness of perception of a work depends, on the one hand, on its artistic merit, and on the other hand, on the perceptual characteristics of the reader. This means that not only literary works can be truly artistic and non-artistic, but also the perception of readers can be artistic and non-artistic. A literary work is a multi-layered system. The first layer - the language of the work - requires the reader to understand the metaphorical nature, assumes that the reader has a certain linguistic baggage, has a linguistic flair. The next level is the reality described in the work: people, nature, facts of personal and public life. Understanding this layer requires the reader to have a certain stock of life experiences, an understanding of the psychology of people and characters. Third layer - ideological content works. To understand it, you need a certain level of development of the individual as a whole, the ability to generalize, think abstractly, and often require special knowledge, for example, from history, economics, etc.

The art of reading can be done
an excellent professor of literature.
V. Ostrogorsky

Fiction is of interest to scientists of various specialties: not only literary scholars and linguists, but also psychologists, sociologists, historians, etc. However, before studying a literary work, it must... read.

And here everyone is professionals in the humanities, representatives of other specialties, as well as people without special higher education and so on. - are equal: at the first (not necessarily one-time) acquaintance with a literary text, any of us is a READER. Of course, depending on individual experience, you can be a skilled reader, that is, have mature reading skills, or just starting to learn difficult art reading fiction.

Determining the goal.
The task is to teach read fiction relevant for different forms training: secondary school, training of philology students, etc. It is, to one degree or another, declared and implemented in the practice of teaching Russian literature and the Russian language as a native language, as well as in teaching the Russian language and Russian literature to foreigners.

For the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, a literary text is a favorite teaching material. Developed different kinds educational analysis(interpretation or exegesis) of a literary text: literary criticism, linguostylistic, linguistic, linguistic and cultural studies, etc. As a rule, they transfer learning (research) techniques to the classroom literary text from the standpoint of relevant science. And this, in our opinion, ... “puts the cart before the horse.”

Since you can only study (research!) a previously understood text. Analysis, i.e. cognition of a text in the categories of a particular science is not a means of directly perceiving/understanding the text, but it can deepen existing understanding, fit the text into a broad scientific - literary or cultural - context, etc. Practice shows that in classes on the analysis of literary texts, foreign language students are more often familiar with ready-made options for interpreting literary works than analyzing the text on their own, and in an extracurricular situation, if they need to read/understand an unfamiliar literary text, they experience significant (often insurmountable) difficulties, they simply do not know - where to begin.

Thus, target work with literary texts should be formulated as follows: teaching independent understanding of texts. The set goal will determine both the principles for selecting text material and the organization of work on it, as well as final result educational activities.

Literary text or work of art
For further discussion, it is necessary to distinguish between two objects: a literary text and an artistic (literary) work, because failure to distinguish them leads to confusion.

Artistic text- this, according to Yu.M. Lotman, is one of the components of a work of art, far from the only one, but “an extremely essential component, without which the existence of a work of art is impossible” [Lotman 1972:24].

Let us allow ourselves a self-quote and define artistic text How:
"material embodiment works of fiction;
his verbalized(those. expressed in words), recorded in writing content;
cumulative - from the first letter of the first word to last point(or other punctuation mark) at the end of the last page - linguistic expression literary work"[Kulibina 2000: 54].

Besides literary text, a work of art also includes all its variants and sketches, the history of creation, known or alleged prototypes of heroes, events, etc., certain evidence of the author’s intention, authoritative critical analyzes and literary analysis of the themes and ideas of the work, various interpretations of the work of art (known theatrical performances, film adaptations, etc.), etc. A work of art understood in this way does not have clearly defined contours; it can be modified, supplemented, etc. Of course, the entire amount of information that makes up a work of fiction is accessible only to specialist literary critics. And even then, in any case, the question of completeness known information in relation to an object - a work of art - can only be decided relatively.

Any reader (a specialist literary critic can also play this role) first of all deals with the text of a literary work, an artistic text. And you must form your opinion about it, formulate for yourself its personal meaning based on what the author SAID in the text. Those. we can talk about the self-sufficiency of a literary text: it contains everything that is necessary for its understanding, and there is no need for additional comments different types, explanations, reference texts, etc.

An important methodological conclusion follows from the above: the material for learning to read fiction is a literary text. This or that amount of information related to a work of art (but not included in its literary text) can be presented to students after the text is independently understood by them. Otherwise, prematurely acquired knowledge (“ready-made understanding”) will interfere with the process of semantic perception of the text 1 .

For a writer, a text is never complete: “a writer is always inclined to refine, complete. He knows that any detail of the text is only one of the possible implementations of a potential paradigm. Everything can be changed. For the reader, the text is a cast structure, where everything is in its only possible place, everything carries meaning and nothing can be changed."([Lotman 1999:112]; our italics - N.K.).
According to Yu.M. Lotman, a literary text should be perceived, first of all, “as a message in a natural language.” This will be the basis for its further comprehension as a work of art. Based on this authoritative opinion, we consider the literary text as communicative unit, a means of communication given language, however, is a special means in which language realizes not only communicative, but also aesthetic functions.

Principles for selecting literary texts
Based on the stated goal - teaching the understanding of literary texts, selection principles textual material (literary texts!) can be formulated as follows:
a literary text should be such that the potential reader, firstly, wanted and secondly, smog his understand.

1. The interest of the student (potential reader) is important because it creates an internal motive for the activity, due to which the activity itself (despite the difficulties of its implementation) becomes more attractive and effective. Any teacher can give examples of how lively and interesting a lesson can become if the personal (internal) motives of students are affected. Here it is necessary to take into account the age, gender, and often national, as well as social and other characteristics of the audience. Therefore, in principle, there cannot be lists of literary texts that are required reading: what goes well with one audience may be absolutely uninteresting for another.

However, we will allow ourselves one recommendation based on many years of experience: foreign language students, as a rule, are interested in what is now relevant for Russian readers, i.e. First of all, books by contemporary authors. All ours educational materials- This methodological developments for lessons in RFL texts by contemporary writers [Kulibina 2001; 2004; 2008a]. Tutorial“Reading Poems of Russian Poets” (2014) also includes poems by poets of the second half of the twentieth century (B. Okudzhava, N. Rubtsov, I. Brodsky, etc.)

2. The accessibility of a text for a potential reader is usually understood as the correspondence of the reader’s level of language proficiency to the linguistic complexity readable text. In our opinion, this is true only with regard to grammar. A mandatory requirement is that the text must contain only grammar familiar to the reader.

Regarding vocabulary, this requirement is by no means unconditional, as the classic phrase of L.V. Shcherba (“Glokaya kuzdra…”) and the linguistic fairy tales of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya “Battered Pussies” convince us of. Next, we will focus on how the reader can overcome lexical difficulties when reading.

An important aspect of text accessibility is also that the reader understands situation text, or, as psycholinguists say (for example, T. van Dyck), so that in the reader’s mind it is represented model this situations, known to him based on previous life or reading experience.

Among other requirements for the text used for teaching reading fiction, it should be noted the time required to understand it, or more precisely, the time required for classroom work aimed at understanding it. The text should be such that work on it can be completed in one day’s lesson (45 minutes, 1 hour 30 minutes, etc.). Naturally, understanding the same text may require different amounts of time. different groups.

Organization of work on a literary text
Traditionally, educational work on a literary text consists of three stages: before-, during- and after text. Most methodologists agree on this, but each one determines in his own way at what stage, what and how should be done.

For us the priority is the stage textual work, because It is at this stage that the actual reading takes place, i.e. perception, understanding and experience of a literary text. If at certain conditions(for example, lack of classroom time) before- And after text stages of work can be reduced to one or two questions, or even omitted or performed as homework, That textual work must be carried out in the classroom to the fullest extent possible.

In order to present classroom work on a literary text exactly as system(and not an arbitrary set of randomly selected tasks), we will sequentially look at all stages of work: pre-, during- and after text

1. Pre-text work.
When working on a literary text, you should focus on the actions of a native speaker reader. Turning to our own reading experience, we cannot help but notice that the beginning of reading a book is usually preceded by a certain moment when we have a desire to read this particular book.

Hence, the main goal of pre-text work- make the foreign reader want to read the proposed text. One possibility is to interest the potential reader in the personality of the author.

Pre-text work can be done in class or at home. Each teacher, at his own discretion, can add something of his own, something that may be of interest to his audience.
In our opinion, at the stage of pre-text work not worth it:
- talk about the work itself, because then it’s no longer interesting to read,
- invite students to complete language tasks (“remove language difficulties”), because Almost all, for example, lexical difficulties can be overcome during the reading process (i.e. at the textual stage); in any case, it is worth trying to overcome them on your own (how to do this will be discussed further).

2. Text-based work.
The main goal of textual work- independent semantic perception (including experience, i.e. perception at the level of ideas) by the reader of a literary text. This goal can be achieved by modeling the processes that occur when reading fiction in the mind of a native reader.

Most of these processes in natural conditions occur subconsciously, in a reduced form; the reader sometimes does not realize on the basis of what data he comes to certain conclusions or why certain images appear in his imagination. However, if while reading a native speaker encounters any difficulty (linguistic, semantic, figurative), he tries to overcome it with the help of a linguistic guess, i.e. “launches” the reflexive mechanism using one or more (one after another) cognitive operations (strategies).

Reading a literary text by a foreign speaker is not least characterized by the fact that he much more often has a need to overcome various difficulties (which is quite natural) and, therefore, he needs developed skills language reflection (in conditions of reading on foreign language). The situation is made easier by the fact that the mechanisms of linguistic guesswork (language reflection) are universal, and we are not talking about the formation of new skills, but about creating conditions for the positive transfer of existing ones (formed by reading in the native language).

2.1. If a literary text offered for reading has a title, it is necessary to pay attention to it: invite students to build a reading forecast, think about what a text with that title might be about.
Reading is controlled by so-called anticipation, i.e. We, wittingly or unwittingly, but inevitably predict the development of events in the text; this is a pattern of mature reading. As a rule, it is impossible to fully reveal the meaning of its title before reading the text. You don’t need to do this in a lesson either; you should limit yourself to what the name itself allows you to do, i.e. its meaning, not its meaning.

Text small volume(For example, short poem) can be presented to students directly in the classroom. It is advisable to invite students to read the story at home either without a dictionary, or, on the contrary, to try to cope with difficulties in the traditional way (check it in a dictionary) and see what comes of it. In any case, the text should be heard in the audience.

It is not necessary to read the entire text at once; you can present the text to students in fragments. In this case, after reading the fragment, there is a discussion of it, guided by questions from the teacher 2. You should not ask students to read the text aloud; at this stage, such a task is ineffective: unprepared reading with many errors will not be useful and will not bring pleasure to either the one who reads or the one who listens.

The text can be read by the teacher or heard in a special educational audio recording (but not in the author's or actor's performance).

2.2. Understanding a foreign language and foreign cultural literary text is not an easy task for the reader. In order for students’ activities to be more effective, it is advisable to divide it into parts (this heuristic technique, coming from Descartes, can be very useful in this case). In our practice, the text is divided into small fragments (minimum one sentence), relatively independent in semantically, on which work is being carried out (in a poetic text this can be a line or stanza, in a prose text - one or several paragraphs).

As a rule, in a literary text it is not a static situation that is presented, but its dynamic unfolding, in other words: the general situation of the text is a sequence mini-situations(the maximum possible number of which is equal to the number of sentences of the text).

During classroom work, it is not always possible to use all the mini-situations that make up the overall situation of a literary text, for example, a story, and therefore it is necessary to make a strict selection, highlighting only the main points (semantic milestones). These must certainly include those mini-situations in which the main characteristics of the general situation of the text are reflected: Who(subject/subjects), What does(event/events), Where(place) and When(time).

The experience of practical educational work shows that the reader’s orientation in the characteristics of the character, the place and time of the events described, etc., as it were, “launches” the mechanism of the reader’s creative (intellectual and emotional) activity. Language means expressions of the main characteristics of the situation (for example, character nominations) are key units text.

2.3. Within the framework of a fragment (mini-situation), work begins with attracting students’ attention to one or another key unit of text, because According to psychologists, the initial moment of understanding is always the awareness of misunderstanding.

2.3.1. After the attention of students in one way or another (from direct pointing to an object to more complex formulations of questions and tasks) is drawn to the key unit, it is necessary to make sure that its linguistic meaning is known to students. If an unfamiliar word is encountered, tasks guide students to independently identify its meaning, i.e. to use a variety of cognitive strategies (or linguistic guesswork) different types): based on the grammatical appearance of the word, the syntactic structure of the sentence, the composition of the word, the context, etc. 3

However, knowing only the meaning of a linguistic unit does not guarantee the reader understanding of the text, because it is important to understand its text sense. To clarify the meaning of a text unit in text-based tasks, the following techniques (cognitive strategies) can be used: selection of synonyms with subsequent analysis of the differences in their meanings, reliance on the artistic context, involvement of background knowledge, and common sense etc. 4

These two stages (understanding meaning and sense) constitute a single conceptual level understanding the text, the achievement of which is sufficient when working on any non-fiction text.

2.3.2. The perception of a literary text will be incomplete if the conceptual level is not supplemented by perception on level of ideas.

In the process of reading a unit of literary text - verbal images- are transformed in the reader’s mind into reader's ideas, which can be visual, auditory, emotional, etc. Thanks to ideas, the reader’s projection of the text acquires flesh and blood, becoming not a dead imprint, but a living, dynamic picture.

Each reader has his own - characteristic of his style of perception - methods of recreating the reader's ideas, therefore the task of the teacher at this stage is not so much to teach new ones, but to awaken creative activity reader, in activating his own creative activity. This goal can be achieved by tasks that invite the foreign reader to imagine what he is reading about and to describe the images and ideas that arise in the imagination.

Such work encourages the reader to emotionally experience the images of the text and further to aesthetic emotions, which lay the foundations aesthetic perception artistic text. Special tasks aimed at the reader’s perception of a literary text as a work of art are not required.

Thus, work on each key unit is based on a single algorithm: from the language values to the textual meaning and reader's view. The sequence of work on key units is dictated by the text itself, i.e. depends on the order in which they appear before the reader (from the first fragment/mini-situation to the last).

It is desirable that after working on each fragment/mini-situation of a literary text, students are given the opportunity to listen to it (in a recording or reading by the teacher).

2.4. After finishing working on the text in fragments/mini-situations, it is advisable to read the text in its entirety again and/or listen to its full sound recording. It is advisable to use questions for the entire text, asking students to comprehend everything they have read, draw conclusions, evaluate, etc., as homework (written or oral), because To carry out these cognitive operations, the reader (even a native speaker, and even more so a foreign speaker) needs a certain amount of time.

3. Post-text work.
This stage of classroom work, but in our opinion, is optional, because if the textual work was carried out correctly, then “the influence of the read work on the reader’s personality” (O.I. Nikiforova) occurs regardless of whether the appropriate instructions are given or not, otherwise all the “controlling” tasks will not give the desired effect.

And yet, post-text work can be carried out either in the classroom or at home.

At this stage, students are offered generalizing tasks so that they can express their understanding of what they have read, own opinion about the text, as well as tasks asking to connect, for example, statements (opinions, ideas, etc.) of the author in a read interview (pre-text work) with how this is implemented (or reflected, etc.) in the literary text and etc.

Students can get acquainted with additional texts that allow them to develop or deepen the topic, or get to know the author better, etc.

At this stage, it is possible to use educational and professional translation, any forms of visualization and other techniques and means that the teacher deems appropriate and useful.

The result of the reader's activity
Thanks to both the conscious efforts and unconscious actions of the reader, set of textual meanings(i.e. the meanings of key text units) and reader's ideas, and connections between them, extracted by the reader from the text, turns into a certain system, the core of which can be comprehended and expressed as meaning read literary text, personal meaning- the result of the activity of a particular reader.

As practice shows, the described technique can be used by any foreign audience interested in fiction in Russian. Individualization of the educational process is achieved by selecting texts, poetic and prose, that correspond to certain (age, national, professional, etc.) characteristics of the audience.

No preliminary familiarization of students with the “rules of the game” is required: when working on a text (which a foreign reader perceives as a “simple” discussion of what they read, thinking about what how And why is that It is said) the teacher, when formulating tasks, may well make do with language and speech material known to students.

Lessons using the proposed methodology can
1) be included in the language educational process(aspect “Development/practice of speech”) as needed (once a month or with another degree of regularity, as well as from time to time, for example, as a “gift” for the holiday - “Christmas” by I. Brodsky);
2) form a cycle, for example, as part of the course “Reading Fiction”.
With sufficiently long training, students develop and improve the skills of independent reading of texts (and not only literary ones).

Now let's look at a practical example. Let's take one of the textbook poems by A.A. Blok.

1 Night, street, lantern, pharmacy,
2 Pointless and dim light.
3 Live for at least another quarter of a century -
4 Everything will be like this. There is no outcome.
5 If you die, you’ll start over again,
6 And everything will repeat itself as of old:
7 Night, icy ripples of the channel,
8 Pharmacy, street, lamp.
October 10, 1912

Understanding this poem (like any other literary text) involves answering the following questions:

Who is the text talking about? Who is his hero/heroes?
What is he/they doing? What event/events are/are being described?
Where is it all happening?
When?

But it is not enough to simply find words in the text that answer these questions. Need to think: Why is it said this way and not otherwise?

The order of work on this poem can be as follows 5 (omitting the pre-text stage, let’s focus on textual work).

Teacher:
- Read the first two lines of the poem. Find answers to questions in them, When And Where does the event described in the poem happen?

Possible student answers 6 :
- Night.
- City (street).

Teacher:
- Why do you think they are mentioned? flashlight And pharmacy?

Possible answers:
- Maybe, flashlight burns.
- The sign is on pharmacy.
- Light in the pharmacy window. There - on the window - it is written pharmacy.

Teacher:
- What kind of light do you think is being talked about in the second line?

Possible answers:
- This is the light of a lantern.
- Pharmacy window light.

Teacher:
- Why do you think the light is named meaningless And dim 7 ?

Possible answers:
- There is no one on the street. It is unclear for whom it shines.
- The light is weak. Unpleasant.
- Nobody. There's no point in shining.
- Pointless consumption of electricity.

Teacher:
- Who do you think sees and describes this picture? Night, street, pharmacy…?

Teacher:
- Can we understand his condition, what he feels, what is in his soul?

Possible answers:
- He doesn't sleep even though it's night.
- He feels bad, sad, that’s why he doesn’t sleep.
- Something happened, and now there is no point...

Teacher:
- Read the third and fourth lines of the poem. How do you understand them? Who is the poet talking about? live? How - in other words - can you convey the meaning of the third line? Is the expression clear? There is no outcome?

Possible answers:
- You live...
- If you live another 25 years.
- This is a generalization: if you live another quarter of a century... The poet speaks about himself and any person.
- If nothing changes in life, it’s bad.
- No matter what you do, you won’t change anything.
- Exodus, maybe this is the way out? No exit.
- He feels very bad... And scared.

Teacher:
- Read the fifth and sixth lines. How can you understand them?

Possible answers:
- If you die, will you start all over again? Unclear!
- Maybe he thinks that death will not change anything?
- Death won't help.
- He feels very bad.
- He suffers...
- And no one can help him. 8

Teacher:
- Read the poem to the end. Notice that the last lines almost repeat the first two. What new does the reader learn and what conclusions can he draw?

Possible answers:
- New information icy ripples of the channel. Cold.
- This is winter.
- No, autumn. The poem was written on October 10.
- Ripple means the wind is blowing. Cold wind.
- In this city there is channel. Maybe this is St. Petersburg.
- Or Venice?
- If Blok, then Petersburg!

Teacher:
- Why do you think the poet begins and ends the poem almost the same?
Possible answers
- There is no outcome.
- Nothing can be changed.
- The circle is closed.

Teacher:
- Read the poem in its entirety. How do you imagine his character? Where is he located?

Possible answers:
- He looks like Blok.
- This is a man. Poet.
- He's not on the street.
- He is in the room. Standing at the window.
- Looking out the window. Sees an empty dark night street...
- The lantern sways in the wind.
- It's dark in the room. He's alone.
- He's lonely.

Teacher:
- What do you think this poem is about?

Possible answers
- About a lonely person.
- About loneliness.
- About longing.

What can you call this work on the text of a poem?
Linguistic analysis?
Yes and no. Yes, because we parsed words, sentences, i.e. linguistic units. No, because the main thing was not the linguistic meanings of these units, but those meanings that arise on their basis in this artistic text, i.e. we are dealing with text units. We also talked about those ideas and images that arise in the reader’s mind when reading this poem by Alexander Blok.
So, maybe this is literary analysis? But we did not use literary terminology and, perhaps, our analysis will seem amateurish to a literary scholar.

The main objective of the methodology we propose is for students to master the skills independent work above the text, learned to effectively use the necessary cognitive strategies at all levels of perception of a literary text and thereby received “open access” to everything that was created, is being created and will be created by writers and poets in Russian

What are the specifics of the proposed approach?
For us text was original reality. We approached him with unified philological position(simultaneously the point of view of language and literature) and were focused on reality of the whole text. Our efforts were aimed at implementing possibilities of human understanding.

Philology - the art of understanding what is said and written, or the service of understanding- helped us fulfill one of the main human tasks - to understand another... (the highlighted words belong to S.S. Averintsev [Averintsev 1990: 545]).
Thus, we can say that the methodology we propose for teaching reading fiction implements philological approach To literary text .

Literature:

Averintsev 1990 - Averintsev S.S. Article Philology // Linguistic encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1990.
Kulibina 2000 - Kulibina N.V. Literary text in linguodidactic comprehension. - M., State. IRE, 2000.
Kulibina 2001 - Kulibina N.V. Why, what and how to read in class. - St. Petersburg, Zlatoust, 2001.
Kulibina 2004 Kulibina N.V. Written by women. A reading guide for students of Russian as a foreign language. - M., Russian language. Courses, 2004
Kulibina 2008- Kulibina N.V. We read Russian in class and at home. Book for the student. - Riga, RETORIKA-A. 2008.
Kulibina 2008a Kulibina N.V. We read Russian in Russian language lessons. Book for teachers. - Riga RETORIKA-A. 2008.
Kulibina 2014 - Kulibina N.V. We read poems by Russian poets. Textbook for students of Russian as a foreign language (7th edition) - St. Petersburg, Zlatoust, 2014.
Lotman 1972 - Lotman Yu.M. Analysis of poetic text: Structure of verse. - M., 1972
Lotman 1998 - Lotman Yu.M. Inside thinking worlds. Man - text - semiosphere - history. - M., Languages ​​of Russian culture, 1999.

Dr. ped. sciences, professor
State Institute
Russian language named after. A.S. Pushkin.

Moscow, Russia

1 Similar to how uninteresting and even pointless it becomes to read a detective story if you already know who the criminal is.

2 See educational materials in [Kulibina 2001; 2004; 2008a; 2014].

3 For more information about cognitive strategies, see [Kulibina 2000; 2001; 2008a].

4 For more details, see ibid.

5 Before reading a poem, students should not be told anything about its content so that they have the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.

6 Here and below, under the heading “Possible student answers” ​​(hereinafter referred to as “Possible answers”), real student answers recorded in lessons are used. In some cases, the answers received in different groups are shown side by side; this is done to make the students’ train of thought more clear, because not always every stage of reasoning is verbalized, i.e. formalized by the participants in the discussion as a speech utterance

7 If there is any doubt that students know lexical meanings words meaningless and dull, you can invite students to use one of the cognitive strategies [Kulibina 2001] to establish the meaning unknown word. In the first case, this is a reliance on the composition of the word, on the known prefix bes- and the root meaning-, which allows one to draw a conclusion about the meaning of the entire word, and in the second - on the reader’s extralinguistic knowledge of what the light of a lonely lantern on a dark street is like, as one might call its (dull, weak, etc.)

8 We believe that students should not be required to interpret these lines in more depth; it is enough if they understand the condition lyrical hero poems (by the poet himself?) and sympathize with him.