Russian Language Olympiad as a Cognitive and Cultural Experiment (on the Material of the “Lyro-Epic Hymn for Driving the French out of the Fatherland” G. R. Derzhavin)

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of the methodological approach to the formation of tasks for the school Olympiad in the Russian language as a set of complementary research tasks. The cultural and cognitive orientation of the developed competences of students, text-centeredness as the basis of the theoretical concept of the developers, and the cultural and historical value of the text material are brought up to date. The teaching and controlling functionalities of the tasks are evaluated. By the example of the analysis of the set of tasks for the Interregional Olympiad “Mendeleev” on the example of “Lyro-epic Hymn for driving the French out of the Fatherland” by G. R. Derzhavin the expediency of forming the whole set on the basis of a single text is substantiated. The systemic nature of this kind of tasks allows participants of the Olympiad to come to a holistic understanding of the text, based on its linguistic analysis, contributes to the development of analytical reading skills. Appealing to the text material of the past epochs lets see the language facts and phenomena in dynamics, realize the language and culture connected with it in the process of development, develop associative thinking, based on the interdisciplinary links and encyclopedic background knowledge. The research character of the Olympiad presupposes, firstly, a scientific grounding of the tasks formulated by the teachers in connection with the linguistic problems, revealed by them during the analysis of the literary text (in particular, punctuation differences were revealed in the editions of the text of “Hymn…” of 1815, 1870, and the semantics of the differences was comprehended). Secondly, a participant of the Olympiad finds himself in a situation of “cognitive-cultural experiment”, in which it is impossible to directly reproduce the knowledge formed by the school curriculum, but requires their integration in the process of interpreting the pupil’s personal experience of linguistic reflection.

Keywords:

subject olympiads, Russian language teaching methodology, analytical reading, text-centered approach, linguistic analysis of the literary text, G. R. Derzhavin, Russian punctuation