Psychological Approaches for Building up a Monologue-Story

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to define the communicative functions which monologue speech performs; to describe the characteristics of monologue speech; to show psychological approaches for building up a monologue-story.

The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization.

The results of the research. We distinguish the main psychological approaches which help pupils to understand English texts. The first one is the approach of Hermeneutics. It sees in the interpretation of the subject perceiving the novel, which is based on the imagination and intuition of the recipient, which allows him / her not only to reveal the author’s idea, but also to feel the process of creating the text. General theoretical backgrounds of hermeneutics and the approach to understanding as the actualization of reflection will be presented in our further articles. The process of understanding how to build meanings occurs by actualizing reflection, the most important source of the person’s experience that allows a person to improve his / her personality.

The next approach is psycho-linguistic. We proved that the comprehension of the text was directly connected with the understanding of the person’s speech. We formulated the main aspects, which in subsequent psycholinguistic and cognitive studies were explained in the following aspects: 1) the activity basis of speech, such as its extralingual characteristics; 2) internal speech or universal subject code; 3) the concept of meaning and significance.

Conclusions. The main for building up a monologue-story is a cognitive approach. The defining feature of the cognitive approach for the study of comprehension was the position that language was only a small part of the holistic phenomenon that speakers are trying to learn. The process of cognition is based on the complex interactions of memory processes, physiological characteristics of a man, his / her knowledge of the world, the social context of utterances, ways of interaction of all the activities of the individual in general and the organization of all types of knowledge in particular.

The cognitive approach characterizes two main factors: 1) shifting the attention of researchers from the object (a text) to the subject («Me – the speaker»; «Me – the listener»; «Me – the reader»); 2) shift of the person’s attention from clearly identified micro-units, which are considered in isolation, to units with a high degree of complexity. In the first case, the understanding of speech is considered as a constructive activity of the subject, carried out on the basis of his / her knowledge; in the second one, involving more complex units for comprehension analysis instead of relatively simple messages. Accordingly, along with the text, the object of the activity, we try actively studying the subjects-speakers (listeners / readers) processes.

The movement from meaning to sense determines the very process of understanding, in which we identify several integrated stages that have semantic independence: a psychophysiological perception of a physical sign (a word, color, spatial form); a recognition of meaning (as «a friend» or «a stranger»); understanding its recurring (general) meaning in language; understanding its significance in the specified context (near or far); active-dialogic understanding (agreement – disagreement), such as the evaluative moment in understanding.