Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 1, April 2001

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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. One of the central ideas underlying this step is that the study of the artistic legacy of the past enriches our knowledge and feelings and makes keener our perception of the beautiful. The well developed (by that moment) ability of young students to notice and remember various peculiarities of the pictures of the nature greatly help them to discover in the works of art the symbols associated with definite meanings. One may find more information about this step in Fomichova & Fomichov (1996), Fomichov & Fomichova (1997).

 

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. Experience indicates that initially young students don't possess this ability. But it may be considerably developed very quickly, during several lessons, due to the well developed (by that moment) ability of children to notice even little changes in the pictures of the nature around them and due to the previous lessons devoted to studying the symbolic language of painting, including the language of a portrait. The implementation of this step in the EIT-methods includes, in particular, solving by children the following task: to describe the character and habits of the White Rabbit after the reading of Chapter 1 of "Alice's Adventures in Wonder Land" by Lewis Carroll.

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. In our experiment, the principal attention was paid to analysing a number of metaphors from the works of the well-known Russian poet Boris Pasternak and from the translations of these works into English. This step is essentially based on the knowledge and skills acquired by young students during steps 2, 3, 4, and 5. It should be added that young children begin to learn and compose simple poems during the first year of studies; they learn by heart poems with beautiful descriptions of feelings evoked by nature at the 3rd step and later. From the scientific point of view, the purpose of this step is the further development of children's symbolic thinking and figurative, metaphoric thinking. Young children are taught that poetical metaphors are symbolic representations of some meanings reflecting the thoughts and feelings of the poem's author. The pupils are taught to consider the task of understanding a poetical metaphor as a particular aspect of the task of decoding a symbolic expression in order to penetrate the feelings and thoughts of its author. For the success of decoding a metaphor, it is necessary to draw on all available background knowledge pertaining to the described situation. The idea is to make a new important step in teaching children to process effectively symbolic information of diverse kinds accumulated by mankind during many centuries - from painting and sculpture to music, hence the purpose is to further develop the figurative thinking of children. Experience shows that all average eight to ten-year-old children of usual abilities are able to make this step. But when a child is additionally studying painting or music, this step exerts an even richer, more many-sided influence on the development of his/her personality. This influence is reflected, in particular, in the following home composition in FL showing the emergence of a picture in words as a result of visualizing music:

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. An important role in realizing this step (as in the case of Step 2) is played by the ideas of the theory of frames suggested by M.Minsky (Minsky, 1974). Children are taught to proceed from a frame-like representation of a situation (or event) to be discussed. E.g., the frame "Birthday" may include the slots "Awakening in anticipation of a holiday", "Season", "Gifts", "Birthday cake with candles". Young students are taught to find images associated with all or some slots and being able to activate the fantasy of the communication partner in order to enable him/her to perceive better, and more completely the transferred information and emotions.

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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