Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 1, April 2001
_______________________________________________________________
A
Many-Staged, Humanities-Based Method of Realizing
The
Thought-Producing Self of the Child
By
Vladimir
Fomichov and Olga Fomichova
Abstract
Some
negative tendencies of acquainting children with computers at an early age are
analysed. In particular, the hypothesis is put forward that this process may
hamper, and/or restrain the complete realization of the creative potential of
the child. The concept of the 'Thought-Producing Self' is explained.
A method of realizing the Thought-Producing Self of every average child
under the age of nine and, hence, a way of supporting and enhancing the creative
potential of the young generation, is outlined.
The key idea is the early development of children's symbolic information
processing abilities, first of all, natural-language-processing skills. The
suggested approach has been successfully used for eleven years in teaching over
360 children between the ages of 4 to 19. This approach is formed by the theory
of dynamic conceptual mappings and the system of emotional-imaginative teaching,
developed in Moscow within lessons of language (mainly English, but also Russian
and German), communication culture, literature, poetry, and art. It is
conjectured that the outlined original method may substantially contribute to
the implementation of UK compulsory National Literacy Strategy.
Introduction:
Computers, Thought-Producing Self of the Child, and the
Humanities
The emergence of a new information society has raised a number of new problems
for researchers working in the humanities. One such problem is the long-term
consequence of teaching very young children to interact with computers and the
Internet. In recent years, many countries have lowered the age at which chidden
are systematically introduced to computers. Computers have come into primary
schools; and attempts at using computers for a number of projects in the
preprimary educational system have been already made.
Meanwhile, there are reasons to believe that introducing children to computers
too early may hamper the cognitive development of the child, and restrain the
realization of his/her complete creative potential (Fomichov and
Fomichova, 2000; Fomichova and Fomichov, 2000; Fomichova, 2000). The
principal subject of this paper is what can be done in order to create the
preconditions of a successful child - computer interaction in the long-term
perspective.
Trying to describe the stages of the ripening development of the child's
personality, cognitive psychologists introduced several
"self-concepts". For instance, Ecological Self (it emerges as a result
of interactions with the environment), Interpersonal Self (the self defines
itself as a social being through social interactions), Self-Narrative (around
the age of three, children become interested in the past and future and begin to
acquire the memory skills on which narrative depends) and the Emotional Self (Snodgrass
and Thompson, 1997).
In our recent publications (Fomichov and Fomichova, 2000a;
Fomichova and Fomichov, 2000b; Fomichova, 2000) we expressed the opinion
that this definition does not include one of the most important Selves, the
‘Thought-Producing Self’ ('TPS'). The essence of this new concept may
be explained as follows. The
child has to understand that his/her brain produces socially
important thoughts and rationalisations. This moment is the beginning of
defining himself/herself as a personality who is able to think - thinking that
causes appreciation and praise. The child has to know that the workings of
his/her mind, thinking, is appreciated, acknowledged and respected.
It should be stressed that we consider the ‘Thought-Producing Self’ not
as the ability of the child to understand that he/she can think. By
definition, the ‘Thought-Producing Self’ is realized in the child only
if he/she is able to generate ideas that have a relatively high
social significance. This means that such ideas are greatly appreciated by other
persons (parents, teachers, and other children), because these ideas are, for
example, nice, bright metaphoric descriptions of some situations or pictures, or
because they help to solve some practical problem. In all cases, the action of
producing thoughts receives a positive response. This stimulates the child to
continue to think in this way.
We suppose that the intensive use of computers by the child before the realization of his/her thought-producing self may prevent
the child from being able to develop as a creatively thinking personality. The
unrestricted use of the computer in information processing can retard and
restrain the child’s cognitive development, for example, as in the use of
calculators in mathematics. That is why we put forward the hypothesis
that realizing the ‘Thought-Producing
Self' of the child is the principal cognitive precondition for the successful,
systematic involvement of the child with the computer.
We
elaborated a comprehensive, many-staged method of realizing TPS of each average
child by the age of seven to nine at lessons of language (mother tongue and
foreign languages, on the example of English and German), literature and poetry
in Russian, English, and German, communication culture, and the symbolic
language of painting. This method underlies a syllabus covering ten years of
continuing lessons. Many components of this original method are described in a
long series of our previous publications, in particular, in (Fomichov
and Fomichova, 1997, 1998a, 1998b; Fomichova, 2000; Fomichova and Fomichov,
1999a, 1999b, 2000). In this paper, we give an updated generalized
formulation of this method and describe in more detail several its components,
first of all, our approach to supporting and extending the metaphoric thinking
of children and teaching them to compose verbal portraits and self-portraits.
The
method stated below is a part of our Theory of Dynamic Conceptual Mappings (the
DCM-theory) - a new theory of stimulating effective knowledge acquisition by
children, developing their linguistic skills, associative and reasoning
abilities, of supporting and realizing the creative potential of the child. This
method underlies our original System of Emotional-Imaginative Teaching (the EIT-system).
The principal references to the publications on the DCM-theory and EIT-system
can be found in (Fomichov, 2000; Fomichov and Fomichova, 1994 -
2000; Fomichova and Fomichov, 1996 - 2000).
2.
An outline of an effective method of realizing the Thought-Producing Self of the
child at lessons of language, literature, and poetry
2.1.
Formulation of the method
The method stated below has been implemented over an eleven year period of
extra-scholastic teaching of English as a foreign language (FL), literature and
poetry in Russian and English, communication culture, and the symbolic language
of painting. Also, it
was partially implemented in lessons of German as a third language. The analysis
indicates that the stated method may be used in teaching other FLs or arbitrary
mother tongues. That is why we will use the term "language" instead of
writing "a foreign language or a mother tongue". The initial
formulation of this method is published in (Fomichov and
Fomichova, 1997) as formulation of a method of positively developing the
consciousness of the child. In this paper, we set forth a modified formulation
of our method interpreted as a many-staged, humanities-based method of realizing
the Thought-Producing Self of the child.
The
components of our method are called steps. The lessons pertaining to different
steps may interchange. In fact, one lesson may include the learning of materials
relating to different steps.
Step
1. The purpose of this step is to give a considerable initial impulse to
developing the symbolic thinking and analogical thinking of young learners. For
this, the rules for reading words and basic rules of grammar of the studied
language are explained by means of special stories and fairy-tales designed to
be both interesting and thrilling for young students. The duration of this step
is approximately one academic year (8 months), the starting age is five to six
years or, in some cases, four and a half years. More information about this step
may be found in Fomichov & Fomichova (1994), Fomichova and
Fomichov (1996).
Step
2. The purpose of this step is to teach young children to reconstruct the
complete situation meant by a word or a word combination proceeding from all
available frame-like background knowledge. The paper Fomichova
& Fomichov (1996) contains a detailed description of this.
Step
3. This step is destined for (a) learning the lexics of describing nature, (b)
teaching young children to use a rich language for the means of describing the
surrounding nature (landscapes and seascapes), (c) explicating and developing
the ability of young children to describe objects and phenomena of nature in a
figurative, metaphorical way. One of the consequences of realizing this step is
that young students acquire very close attention to details observed around them
and notice the little changes in its state.
Step
4. The goal of this step is to teach the basic elements of the language of
painting and, as a consequence, further develop the symbolic thinking of young
children. They are taught that a
painter uses combinations of lines and colours as symbols for expressing his/her
thoughts and feelings. Knowing the meanings of such symbols, one is able to
reconstruct a message conveyed by a picture and expressing the thoughts and
feelings of its author for future generations of people. In particular, young
students learn the basic elements of the language of a portrait and, later,
receive initial knowledge about the language of impressionism.
Step
5. The purpose is to develop the skill of integrating numerous dispersed pieces
of information for making judgements about a person, about his/her character,
habits, and motives.
Step
6. The destination of this step is to extend the ability of children to
understand metaphors and, for this, to teach children to understand complicated
poetical metaphors occurring in the works of the best poets. This step is
described in Section 6 of Fomichova & Fomichov (1996).
That is why we indicate below only its main features.
Step
7. The purpose of this step is to teach young students to find appropriate
language means, including metaphors, for conveying some given information and
emotions to a partner in communication in a manner providing the possibility of
achieving the goal of communication. The children are to be taught to attract
all knowledge and skills acquired during the previous steps in order to
successfully realize their goals in communication.
Step
8. This is a distributed step covering several years of studies and aimed at
developing in children the skill of building the generalized conceptual
representations of problem situations, finding an appropriate decision, first on
a generalized level, and then concretizing that decision for following it in
life.
Step 9. The goal of this final distributed step is to develop the ability of applying all accumulated skill and knowledge for self-expression and for effective reasoning about the character and motives of the literary personages and, most importantly, of parents, friends, colleagues, because the integral goal is to contribute to effective social adaptation of children, their success in both their personal lives and professional careers. Very important components of this step are teaching children to compose verbal portraits (first of all, of their mother) and teaching them to compose a verbal self-portrait.
2.2.
Implementation of the method
Additional
data about a realization of our method are as follows. Proceeding
from the DCM-theory, we elaborated a unique, highly effective extra-scholastic
programme of harmonic humanitarian development of the child. The programme is
destined for teaching children during ten or eleven years, where the starting
age is four and a half to six years. The
programme has been personally tested with great success by one of the authors
over a period of 11 years. It includes the following series (or cycles) of
lessons: (1) a two-year course (the
age of learners is 5 to 7 or 6 to 8 years) of studying foundations of reading
and speaking English as a FL, including learning basic elements of English
grammar (Present Simple and Past Simple Tenses);
(2) a course on understanding the language (a part of FL) of describing
the nature and feelings evoked by nature; (3)
a course on understanding the symbolic language of painting; (4) a course on
understanding the language of poetry (with the accent on understanding metaphors
and descriptions of nature); (5) a course aimed at (a) first acquaintance with
sciences and (b) developing the abilities to argument their own opinion, to
raise objections, etc.; (6) a course on perfecting the knowledge of English
grammar (during mainly the fifth year of studies). In fact, the lessons of
courses (2) to (6) may interchange.
3.
A brief explanation of the two initial steps of realizing the Thought-Producing
Self of the young child
The
essence of this step consists of demonstrating to young pupils that abstract
objects, symbols and combinations of symbols, are associated with emotionally
brightly coloured objects and situations pertaining to the real or fairy-tale
world; e.g., the letter "Y" is associated with the Wolf from the
fairy-tale about the Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.
Consider
one example. It is difficult to explain to very young children why the verbs in
the 3rd person of Past Simple Tense have no ending "s" but the same
verbs in the 3rd person of Present Simple Tense do have such ending
("reads" but "read", etc.). An interesting story from one of
the previous lessons associates in the consciousness of the child the ending
"s" with a bow. That story about Mr. Do and Lady Teacher is given in (Fomichova
& Fomichov, 1996). The teacher explains that her young students were in
the Past babies and had no hair (were bald). Hence it was impossible to tie a
bow. That is why verbs have no ending "s" in the 3rd person of Past
Simple Tense. The five year old students accept this explanation with great joy
and remember it. As a result of having heard stories of this kind, young
children become aware of the fact that symbolic objects have meanings pertaining
to the real or fairy-tale world.
On
the other hand, the goal of the first step consists in developing analogical
thinking in young children. Each system of symbols is used in some concrete
thematic domain (domains) for expressing the meanings pertaining to some other
domain (domains). For example, the combinations of lines and colours are the
symbols pertaining to painting and used for expressing meanings associated with
the real world. That is why developing symbolic thinking in a domain is a
particular case of developing analogical thinking. For instance, the interesting
stories about the life of verbs and other words (like the stories mentioned
above) establish in the consciousness of the young child a direct link between
the objects and situations of real life and the domain of language entities
(verbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) This is why, as a result of realizing the first
step of our strategy, the consciousness of the young child can more readily
develop the ability to establish diverse analogies.
The
second step in developing the consciousness of the child consists in teaching
young children to reconstruct the complete situation that is nominated by a word
or a word combination proceeding from the background frame-like knowledge
represented in the inner world's pictures, or conceptual systems (CSs), of
children. Such reconstruction helps children to better understand the meanings
of the words and to be ready to see possible consequences, advantages, and
disadvantages of this or that situation nominated by a word or a word
combination. For example, a teacher may ask the students of the 2nd year of
studies (aged mainly 6 to 7
years) to describe the events meant by the phrase "There were preparations
in the Kingdom for the celebration of the birth of the baby-princess". The
results of reconstructing the event (the situation) mentioned in this phrase are
long home compositions in English. One of these compositions is given below.
Example.
PREPARATIONS IN THE KINGDOM (Asya Ivanova, 7 years old, 2nd year)
"The
Carpenter made a cradle for the Princess. The cradle was in the form of a rose
opening in the morning dawn . The walls of the cradle looked like the rose
petals . The cradle was decorated with branches of grapes and flowers . It was
wonderfully perfumed.
There
were many pretty pictures on the walls of this nursery. In these pictures
everyone could see lucent and serene woods, deep blue seas with beautiful
beaches with pink sands and seashells. It was a pretty sight ! The carpet in
this room was so beautiful, like a field with flowers in spring. The windows in
the nursery were magic windows, and the room was aglow with amber light, even if
the weather was rainy. When an unhappy man came into this room, he heard
beautiful low music and became happy.
Everyone
prepared nice gifts for the Princess. Everyone wanted to congratulate the Queen
and King. Snow White brought a basket full of tiny dresses. There were pretty
tiny gowns with bows and laces, beautiful tiny slippers, flashing like countless
diamonds. Everyone was waiting for the Royal baby, like for sun on a rainy
day".
That
step is described in detail, with other examples of young students' home
compositions, in Fomichova & Fomichov (1996). The
starting points for suggesting that step were in the work of Minsky
(1974) which caused the birth of the frame theory (it has been very popular in
the artificial intelligence field) and the paper by Fillmore
(1985).
4.
Developing the skill of figurative describing nature
4.1.
Teaching children to use beautiful expressions for describing nature
A decisive step in developing
the consciousness of young children in accordance with the EIT-system consists
of teaching children to understand the language of describing nature (a part of
the studied FL) and in developing the skill of comparing diverse objects and
phenomena of nature with the well known things and events of every-day life. The
reasons to apply essentially to nature in FL lessons with young learners are
simultaneously obvious and deep. On the one hand, when a teacher solves the task
of teaching five to seven year-old pupils to express thoughts and feelings in
FL, she/he must have the topics for discussion for many months. Naturally, such
topics must be coordinated with the inner world's picture, or conceptual system
(CS) of the young learner. The five to seven year-old child receives the
dominant part of his/her impressions from observing nature. That is why the
majority of the possibilities for developing the young child’s thinking are
provided by that part of the child's CS.
On
the other hand, the eleven-year experience indicates that young students
remember very well, with greatly desire to discover new words and expressions
pertaining to nature. Some impression of the richness of the sublanguage of
English easily acquired by the average six year old Russian child (second year
of studies in experimental groups) is given in the following fragment from a
translation to English of a beautiful poem "Winter Morning"; it was
written by the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in the first half of the
XIXst century:
Beneath
a sky of deepest blue,
Like
carpets of resplendent hue,
The
snowfields lie, in sunshine gleaming.
Deep
woods are lucent and serene,
The
silent firs shine hoary green,
And
neath the ice the rill is dreaming.
It
was seen that all children, (not just several with outstanding intellectual
abilities) easily learned the complete poem (it is five times longer than the
fragment above). Also that they used the beautiful expressions from this and
many other poems in their normal speech, at Christmas and many performances in
English.
This
ease of learning complicated expressions even in a foreign language enables us
to conjecture that studying the descriptive language of nature with very young
learners corresponds excellently to the psychological peculiarities of a child
of that age. As an outcome of such lessons, young children began to compose
short poems of their own (see Fomichova & Fomichov 1996).
4.2.
Teaching young children to create metaphors
Having
acquired a sufficiently large vocabulary and grammatical constructions for
describing the observed scenes of nature or landscape, pupils are being
systematically taught to compare the directly observed objects and phenomena
with objects and phenomena being, at first sight, very dissimilar to the
directly observed ones. Usually, each day of lessons gives one or several highly
interesting examples of comparisons suggested by young students. For instance,
"It is possible to confuse a red fox with a heap of yellow
leaves", "It was a starlit night, and shining stars were reflected in
the water. That is why he happened to scoop out a bucket full of stars"
(Anton Gussev, 6 years old, 2nd year of studies). Little by little, young
pupils acquire the skill and habit of compare one lot of things with a multitude
of others. For example, young children discover that "Nature is swaying on
the sunny swings" (Polina
Rybakova, 8 years old, 3rd year of studies),
"The moon is like a pancake with sour cream"
(Anton Gussev), "The sun beams dashed through the tops of the trees
and looked like spilled orange juice on the white gowns of evergreen trees"
(Sveta Yatsyk, 6 years old, 2nd year).
Our
method distinguishes teaching to compose metaphors at two levels. The metaphors of
the first level are characterized by the coincidence of several main
properties of two entities. For example, let's consider the metaphor
""The moon is like a pancake with sour cream"; it was composed in
English by a six-year-old boy (second year of studies in experimental groups).
The moon is a round yellowish object, very often hidden in some gossamer cloud.
It causes the idea of sour cream. A pancake is also round and yellow.
An
interesting observation is as follows. While creating such a metaphor, a young
boy combined his favourite dish and the moon. It shows that children are very
attentive, and when they perceive the world, their consciousness combines the
fragments of the world round them. For them it is natural to make the moon a
part of their every-day life as well as a pancake. In their consciousness, the
Universe is united by general regularities: "When the stars are reflected
in the water, it seems that it is possible to scoop out a bucket full of
stars". Describing a reflection of clouds or stars in the water, the
children most often use the verb "bathe". "The clouds are bathing
in the water, and they seem to be drenched". The last two examples
illustrate that special perception of the world around by the child's
consciousness.
The
metaphors of the second level are
characterized by the coincidence of a connotation of different entities (objects
or situations). An example of such metaphors is as follows: "The
Summer Garden has shed its sorrow". This metaphor is used to describe
early autumn in St.-Petersburg; the yellow leaves and the falling leaves are
associated with parting and, consequently, with sorrow (Summer Garden is the
first park in St.-Petersburg, Russia, laid out in 1704. It contains a very old
and unique collection of park sculptures).
Let's
consider now the second example of a metaphor of the second level: "The
moon shed its silver light, and it forms a shimmering pathway on the surface of
the water. It seems as if the little angel with silver hair is bathing in the
water". The image of a little angel with silver hair (from a well-known
American fairy-tale) and the shimmering pathway formed by the moonlight has the
same connotation: something mysterious and miraculous.
These
metaphors created by young children reveal their ability to express their
observations in a very impressive and clear way.
The
bright, unexpected comparisons found by one child, become immediately the
property of all the pupils in the group. As a result of active work in such
lessons during several months, many objects and phenomena of nature are
associated in the consciousness of a young child with something-well known,
pleasant, and cosy from the everyday environment of that child. Consequently,
the child begins to love nature as a part of his/her pleasant and cosy every-day
environment. The other consequence of acquiring the habit to compare objects and
phenomena observed in every-day life with different real and imaginary things is
that every-day life becomes much brighter, much more interesting for the child.
We can clearly see this, in particular, in the following home compositions in
FL:
Example
1. THE WINTERDAY (Kseniya
Glashkina, 5 years old, 2nd year of studies)
In
the picture I see a winter day. On the branches of fir trees, pine-trees, and
birches lies fluffy, white snow, glimmering in sunshine. It seems that snowdrops
are covered with jewels. Near the wood there are fields with snow. On the edge
of the snowfield the rill is dreaming. The snow is everywhere. Sunrays make one
way through the grey, big, heavy clouds and run over top-trees. Pine-trees and
firtrees shine hoary green. The bare bushes of birches are covered with snow. It
seems that the oak is with soft, white, and big leaves.
Suddenly
someone in heaven has dashed a big cup of sunlight upon the Earth, and the big
old oak has turned into a fairy King in orange magnificent gown. And around him
young birches in nice gowns are accompanying their beloved King.
In
a nest in the roots of a big fir tree lived the family of the butterfly. Two
little baby-butterflies were sleeping in their beds. In the warm room there was
a fireplace. In the fireplace firewood was snapping brightly. On the table stood
candles, and the room was aglow with amber light. Nearby, in the kitchen,
mother-butterfly was making an apple pie. The father-butterfly was decorating
branches of the fir tree.
Christmas night was coming.
Santa Claus was in a hurry with presents to the family of the butterflies, and
this fairy-tale about Christmas comes to an end.
Example
2.
THE KINGDOM OF THE WINTER (Polina Rybakova, 8 years old, 3rd year of studies)
One
winter day I was sitting near the window looking at the street covered with
fresh clean snow. At first sight, there was nothing so very remarkable in that.
Nor did I think it so very much out of the way to see the falling snowflakes,
snowstorm, the grey cloudy sky and the noisy crows.
But
when afterwards in the evening going to sleep I thought it over it occurred to
me that I ought to have wondered at this. I thought that the snowstorm might be
a wicked magician, Winter, the grey sky with running clouds - his kingdom. Every
beautiful princess that refused to be his wife because he was very angry and
cruel was turned by him into a crow. And then their tears he turned into the
falling snowflakes. And only the coming of the kind Fairy Spring can destroy
this magic.
From a scientific point of view, the great significance of that step in developing the thinking of young pupils is that the consciousness of the child acquires the skill and habit to synthesize many generalized conceptual representations (CRs) of diverse perceived objects and situations, and it builds these CRs looking simultaneously from numerous different sides at many things. This ability of consciousness is perfected during several years of studies, when children are taught to decipher poetical metaphors and understand the thoughts and feelings encoded in the famous works of art. Step by step, the consciousness of the child acquires, over several years, the highly precious skill and habit of constructing generalized CRs of every-day-life problems. It can proceed from diverse standpoints to find an optimal generalized solution of the situation and then invent a concretization of that generalized solution to follow in life. Naturally, the ability to do this is one of the main goals of school education.
5.
New
data about
the role of the impressions from nature in the ripening
of the young child's consciousness
The
goal of this section is (a) to generalize the observations accumulated in the
course of successful application of the method stated in Sections 3, 4 in
teaching 4 to 7 year-old children, (b) to draw the conclusions from these
observations.
A
prolonged and large-scale experiment has indicated that all unselected, average
five to seven year-old children can very easily master the poetical, elevated
style of describing nature, the skill of comparing the objects and phenomena of
nature with seemingly very different objects and phenomena. This surprising ease
enables us to conjecture that (a) the role of the impressions from nature in the
life of 4 to 7-year-old children is extremely high, much higher than is
generally accepted, (b) we managed to find experimentally, by means of
interchanging tests and theoretical speculations, such words and expressions
that, like the conceptual representations (CRs), or mental representations,
constructed by the consciousness of the child harmonize well with the brightest
impressions of young children from nature, and are in good resonance with these
impressions. Probably, the height, the brightness of the emotional coloration of
the created CRs and of considered phrases and discourses pertaining to nature,
coincide with the height and the brightness of the inner images of children's
visual impressions from nature.
All
this may be explained as follows. Between the ages of four and seven (and
earlier), children explore their surroundings for themselves.
In young children this causes strong emotions which are not always
visible or clearly read by adults. The strength of the impressions gained from
newly observed phenomena are well known. For instance, we know of a case when a
child aged eleven months cried when he first saw snow covering all his world.
A
very short time separates 5 to 7 year-old children from the period of
discovering the surrounding world. Also, children discover a number of things at the same age 5
-7 years. Our hypothesis is that our new methods of teaching young children to
describe figuratively nature and their own feelings evoked by nature activate
such regions of the consciousness which were activated earlier at the moments of
astonishment before they discovered pictures and phenomena of the surrounding
world.
Due
to this, the descriptions of the landscapes made by means of a too complicated
(from the adults' point of view) language are natural for the 5 to7year-old
child, he/she accepts them with all the heart and soul.
This explains why very young children embrace with such interest the very
considerable work of studying a FL, on fulfilling home tasks, and why there is
no question of lack of discipline during lessons in groups with 5 to 7 year-old
children.
Let
us mention one example. Waiting for her grandmother, Asya Rybakova, 5 years old,
was learning independently texts in English with descriptions of nature during
two hours of the lessons of FL with other children. She was so carried away by
her reading that she began to read texts aloud. We adduce below one of the home
compositions of Asya in FL.
Example.
LANDSCAPE (Asya Rybakova, 5 years old, 2nd year of studies)
In
the picture I see an autumn landscape. Beauty up and down. Gleaming gold meadows
lay around the small village. Far away stands a church.
I
see a mountain. The slopes of the mountain are covered with forest. The trees
are dressed in golden finery. The top of the mountain is covered with snow.
There is a castle on the top of the hill.
A
beautiful girl lived in the castle. She had long-long hair. Her hair was as
yellow as the sun in the blue sky. Her eyes were as green as the summer meadows.
She sang a song and was happy.
The
methods of emotional-imaginative teaching (the EIT-methods) develop the ability
of children to describe nature proceeding from the deep inner requirement of the
child's consciousness. When the advantage of that age is not used for
explicating and developing the ability of children to describe figuratively
nature, this ability vanishes. Due to the indicated reasons, adults (except a
few outstanding poets) organically are not able to describe so brightly and
metaphorically the surrounding nature around as children of five, six and seven
do regularly.
Consider
additional arguments in favour of our hypothesis. The first one is as follows.
It was explained in details in Fomichova & Fomichov
(1996) and, more briefly, in Section 3, that one of the initial steps in
developing the consciousness of the very young child in accordance with the EIT-methods
consists in teaching pupils to assimilate all available background knowledge for
reconstructing the situations and/or events associated with a given word or
expression. We analyze below the results of fulfilling by 5 to7 year-old
children the homework set which was to describe in FL the meaning of the
expression "the preparations in the Palace for the birth of a
Princess".
The
submitted texts reflecting the work of the consciousness of young children have
a lot of various motives and details. However, you will be stricken by the
presence of some interesting and unexpected common features.
First,
children see in this celebration an embodiment of all that holds the most light,
the most festivity and the most joy. That is why children see those most dear to
themselves as guests at this celebration. Note that these living beings are not
only people but include animals (squirrels, hares, deer, etc.) or birds. They also very often introduce flowers or other plants. For
instance, young children say that:
"The
swans presented their soft fluff for a princess's cushion ... The bear presented
the full basket of berries and mushrooms and honey. The rabbit with his friends
presented a lot of medical herb from the forest, because the girl could be ill.
The tiger presented the finest flower from the jungle, and all the rooms in the
Palace were filled with wonderful smell (odour). The dog and cat presented small
plate and glass and fork and spoon out of the gold" (Olya Kossova, 7 years
old, 2nd year of studies);
"The
gardener planned his best flowers and rose bushes to smell sweetly in honour of
this birthday. The hunter brought a deer Bambi as a gift for a baby. The
fisherman got a gigantic golden fish. The servant presented the baby with a
funny fluffy puppy ... The woodsman carried to the castle singing birds he had
caught in the woods. The dawn presented his flaming light. It seemed the whole
of nature was celebrating this birth" (Audrey Poletayev, 7 years old, 2nd
year);
"The
unicorn - a magic white horse with a horn - got ready for the princess’s
birthday a lot of flowers ... The little angel with silver hair and St. Peter
prepared for present silver and gold stars. Even the little mermaid prepared to
swim from the sea through the rivers, springs, lakes, and rills and reached the
ditch surrounded the Castle. She prepared to present some marvelous seashells
and some strings of pearls ( Masha Sapozhnikova, 6 years old, 2nd year).
Meanwhile,
the fragment of the fairy-tale "Sleeping Beauty" which was the basis
for the homework doesn't mention animals, birds, or fishes at all.
Secondly,
none of the young pupils describes the Princess’s cradle as a little bed
decorated by something. Children see, primarily, the shape and form of the
cradle, and that shape and form is associated with, or is imagined as being
similar to either an animal or a flower. For example, young students say that
"The carpenter made a finest cradle as a big sea shell, mother-of-pearl,
and decorated with roses, lilacs, silk, velvet, and laces" ( Masha
Sapozhnikova, 6 years old, 2nd year); "The carpenter made a cradle. It
looked like a dolphin. Gold stars were in its eyes. On the tail was a ball"
(Nadya Vorobyova, 9 years old, 2nd year);
"The
Carpenter would make the cradle in a form of rabbit that would befit a
Princess" (Dasha Smilga, 6 years, 2nd year of studies), "The
dressmaker prepared the new curtains from the rose petals. The carpenter was
commanded to make the finest cradle that would befit a Princess. He made the
magic cradle like a cat with a soft and fluffy bedcover. The cradle could swing
and tenderly purr, sing a lullaby, tell fairy-tales " (Olya Kossova, 7
years old, 2nd year). One complete homework task of this kind is given below.
All
this shows that children between the ages of five and seven consider people as a
part of nature including obligatorily animals, birds, and plants, not as some
separate part of nature. Since very young children consider themselves as
particles of nature, the impressions from observing nature play an extremely
important role in the processes of the child's consciousness.
The
next observation
is that all pupils in the 2nd year of studies in experimental groups (their
age being
mainly
6 to 7 years) exposed and realized the potential of their own personality at FL
lessons devoted to describing landscapes, seascapes, and to surrounding nature.
Let us mention two bright examples of many.
Over a period of eighteen months, one six year old girl learned to read
well in FL but (a very rare situation) she didn't answer questions or compose
fairy-tales, etc. However, after the lessons on describing nature that she began
to express herself in the medium of paint. The depth and strength of her
emotions were such that she chose to paint her nature pictures using only the
largest sheets of paper (sized 85 cm by 60 cm).
Following this ‘breakthrough’ her class was introduced to the
fairy-tale “Sleeping Beauty” and she began to actively discuss this
fairy-tale and answer questions, etc. It was almost impossible to recognize her
as the same child as informer lessons. One got the strong impression that, as in
the fairy-tale, the girl was awakened after a deep sleep, with her consciousness
open and eager for intensive intellectual work.
Another
girl began studying in an experimental group when she was only 3 years old. For
two years, she was silent for most of the lesson. One day, however, she suddenly
described, in FL (English), so bright a landscape that all the applauded; her
word usage was so colourful and unexpected.
6.
Well-developed symbolic reasoning skill as one of the important final results of
positively developing a child's consciousness
One
of the central ideas of our many-staged method of realizing the
Thought-Producing Self of the child is to develop the skill of symbolic
reasoning. Children are taught that natural language texts, paintings, and
musical compositions are symbolic expressions. The symbols are words and word
combinations, lines and colour combinations, and combinations of sounds and
tunes, respectfully. The task is to decode a symbolic expression (a symbolic
message) and to penetrate the idea (the ideas) of its author. Since this thought
is explained and illustrated many times during many years, it becomes quite
obvious to the children, and their well-developed symbolic reasoning skill can
be observed in many situations, including the situations of every-day life.
Consider one example:
The
17year old students were set the task of describing the situation of meeting
friends at Christmas. They did it musically, using the piano. Four students
started playing the piano simultaneously. Every one was playing his/her own
tune, but it was impossible to distinguish one individual piece of music in the
muddle of sound, because they were overjoyed and didn't listen to each other.
Then, realizing this, they stopped playing, exchanged glances, and started to
play in turn. Finally, they started playing together, but the same tune, on one
piano. This playing was an embodiment of friendship, understanding and happiness
at Christmas time.
7.
Conclusions
Our
eleven year large-scale study has shown that the lessons of languages (mother
tongue and foreign languages), literature and poetry in mother tongue and
foreign languages, and the lessons aimed at learning the symbolic language of
art (e.g. painting) can play a very particular role in preparing children to
successfully enter the new information society. The many-staged method outlined
above and in many of our previous papers provides the possibility of realizing
the Thought-Producing Self of each average child by the age of nine. That means
that each average child can be taught by this age to enjoy the work of his/her
brain, and the birth of original thoughts highly appreciated by others. We
believe that the realization of the child's Thought-Producing Self is the
principal cognitive precondition of successfully acquainting children with
computers in the long-term perspective.
It
is important that the method has been implemented within the context of
language-enriched lessons in language, literature, poetry and art - the areas of
studies generally accepted as central to young children’s humanitarian
development.
Our
method has also a number of other precious features. It allows for the
development of abstract thinking and imagination in children, the love of
nature, the ability to see beauty in all its manifestations, to understand the
language of poetry and painting, to see clearly causal relationships of diverse
events, to understand other people, to express in words their own thoughts and
feelings, and to actively acquire new knowledge. One of the consequences is that
the EIT-methods outstrip other known methods of teaching children under ten to
read fluently and discuss complicated texts in English as a FL (note that
English is very different from Russian). Also, to be able to communicate
thoughts and feelings in a FL, in an interesting manner. In particular, they
considerably outstrip the methods represented in (Scott &
Ytreberg, 1994).
Also
let us mention the following facts: students of the 3rd year of studies in
experimental groups (7 - 8 years) can read fluently and discuss such a
stylistically difficult book as an original version of "Alice's Adventures
in Wonder Land" by Lewis Carroll. They
are able to describe on request the landscapes or surrounding nature depicted by
the author. By the fourth year
students can understand poetical metaphors in FL. The dominant part of the EIT-methods
is language-independent and may be effectively used in teaching children to
express thoughts and emotions in their mother tongue.
Nowadays,
the success in many fields of professional activity considerably depends on a
working knowledge of a foreign language (FL), especially on a good command of
English for non-English-speaking countries. Meanwhile, FL is one of the most
difficult subjects for secondary school students. As confirmed by a number
research studies (see Maclntyre & Gardner, 1991; Phillips,
1991; Aplin, 1991). The use of our method would contribute to making the
learning of English as a FL much easier and effective for young children and
teenagers.
International
evidence shows that both teaching FL and the effective teaching of a mother
tongue (MT) is a complicated problem. Children tend to use a very restricted
sub-language for mutual communication; restricted both in terms of vocabulary
and syntax (Gillon & Dodd, 1994). This helps explain the
problems many teachers in the UK face in teaching poetry; they "are often
aware of a background of hostility to poetry among their pupils" (Taylor,
1994, 212). The world and language of poetry are too removed from the every-day
life and language of children. This is the principle reason for possible
conflicts between pupils and teacher, when he/she tries to teach children poetry
in MT. Thus, a number of specialists in the United Kingdom believe that new
methods are needed to enable teachers to help children master the richness of
English as MT, including the lexical and syntactic constructions used in poems (Marenbon,
1994; Taylor, 1994).
We
believe that our approach may be directly used in English-speaking countries for
teaching children to understand the language of poetry and for developing, as a
consequence, the love of poetry. That would be important from many points of
view, and one of them is bridging the gap between different generations.
Our
many-staged, humanities-based method of positive development of the child's
consciousness was developed in the English language context and provides many
new constructive ideas for transforming the learning of the English language (as
a mother tongue too) into a thrilling discipline. That is why we conjecture that
our original method may substantially contribute to the implementation of UK
compulsory National Literacy Strategy.
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