Speech culture as ferment for social study subjects

Hasmik Ghazaryan

In Armenia while we fall to thinking over working out a simple and useful language course, speech and speech culture have become the subject matter of education and investigation in the world. Speech culture establishes itself in developed countries, becomes a criterion of society's civilization, presents an imperative need to be popularized.

Prominent linguists view speech and its culture from different points of view , compare languages of peoples having different cultures , consider the style values of grammar synonyms.

Whereas common people need to develop their thinking. If anyone has ideas, it is far easier to find the way of expressing them.

That is the reason why the so called "narrative" subjects and in fact the subjects that stimulate thinking: History, Culture Study, Jurisprudence, Political Study, Philosophy, and, of course, Literature become an extensive field for speech culture in school programs. World literature is an arena where man communicates with world thinking. The writer having gained popularity and having been translated into numerous languages, speaks about an individual, society, their correlations and even sometimes about one’s relationship to oneself as Corta՛zar did about an individual’s depression, Burkhart - about disasters of war, Sartre – about getting rid of fears and clinging to life. Readers (learners) think just about these themes and make notes in their blogs improving their speech in this way. The arguments and examples brought by the authors to make their points of view convincing, stimulate teenagers, striving for self establishment, either to bring counterarguments in order to reject the idea being dictated, or to go to the root of the matter, find similar examples in their life experience and with this to trust the writer, to make friends with him. So reading is continued with research work by studying the important events of the historical period and their influence on thinking, the direction of the philosophical way of thinking of the time, the writer’s character in that context and the stories told about him by his friends. Is there a better method of studying literature at school? Why can’t we consider it to be culture of speech?         

It is logical that to express ideas about reading and the themes related to reading, all possible versions should be used: scientific literature, fiction, documentary, analyses, viewing the same phenomenon from different aspects. If, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm  is assigned, it’s social study analyses is undoubtedly done. The main value of this novel like fable is just its being social study based.         

Literature here is the author’s skill to be convincing while creating characters, marking out incidents and presenting them to the reader with apt expressions. Many expressions have the value of idioms which seem to appear here by chance. When with the learner-reader you reveal the writer’s tendency: to tell about what is going on around us in a language comprehensive to everybody, but remains unseen, the learner discovers that the speech (what one wants to say) can and must be tendentious, purposeful and easy to understand. These are communicative features that develop the learner’s skills mentioned above.

In this sense project work is convenient to be done by combining different subjects, which allows doing wider research: reading literature of different styles and in this way to find out the difference of styles and to what extent their borders can be broken.

Thinking about what has been read, seen and heard, forming a point of view and expressing it, stating thoughts in written form and presenting them orally, defending own ideas with arguments, comparing arguments, confronting and summarizing them: these are the issues of speech culture. These are also the issues of a considerable number of subjects intended by the subject syllabuses.      

Educational project work on different subjects favor studying the corresponding field of life, observing it for further application.   

Eventually the learner comes to the solution of problems that come across in life, and sometimes is able to organize his/her life better owing to his/her gained information and skills. Speech is in no way a minor thing when overcoming difficulties in life. The learner is supposed to present his/her project work to public (presentation of final product of project work is one of mandatory terms) to prove the value of his/her work, and to answer the jury’s confusing questions. That is just the culture of speech, or the process of it.

Speech culture is the ferment which will unite all the school subjects to settle down education in one course sooner or later.