ESSAYS BY PUPILS ON FREE TOPICS: FORMAL AND SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION OF THE TEXT

Introduction. Written speech of students is a type of speech activity that takes place under conditions of external motivation. Essays on free topics have varying degrees of “attachment” to age-related needs, the life of schoolchildren, imply the implementation of speech-thinking mechanisms, which are aimed at updating a certain part of the authors’ conceptual systems, the level of their speech competence, strategies for the formation of actual meanings, etc. Consideration of the texts of essays in the aspect of the manifestation of textual categories in them, highlighted by different theorists of the text, is also relevant. The purpose of the article is to evaluate the structure and content of the texts of essays-reasoning of schoolchildren on free topics in terms of the manifestation in them of ways of implementing communicative and cognitive models as types of speech actions inherent in written speech activity, as well as ways of expressing text categories. The material for this study is the texts of essays – discussions on various topics written by students of grades 7–9 of schools in Omsk from 2015 to 2021. The research methodology covered two stages. The first stage consisted in determining the average volume of texts, the largest and smallest essay, speech strategies and tactics, the type of communication, methods of updating cognitive structures, selecting words, distributing subject attributes, highlighting predicates, etc. At the second stage, the formal semantic organization was assessed, representation of categories of text. Results and discussion in the field of text volume showed compliance with the level of age-related development of language ability, the tendency for the implementation of unprepared written speech in texts of a small volume and simple structure, the dependence of the size of texts on the quality of the topic, their concreteness / abstractness, proximity to the consciousness of schoolchildren; complication of the structure and increase in volume by the 9th grade. In the field of content, the interdependence of the size of the texts, the quality of the informational, semantic and structural organization was revealed; concentration of semantic development around the basic concept represented in the title; the determination of the choice of a semantic strategy by the problematic formulation of the topic, the level of abstractness of the dominant concept, its correspondence to the age development of the writers. In the field of communicative and cognitive organization, it was established that there is a set of communicative and cognitive models as methods of speech actions associated with the formation of the subjective beginning of written speech, the development of framework and non-framework means of expressing one’s own and someone else’s I, associated with the genre of reasoning and stereotypes of educational discourse. Conclusion. The analyzed texts of reasoning essays of students of Omsk schools do not differ in the significance of the volume and complexity of the structure, which is associated with the nature of the presentation of the topic, the conditions for the generation of a speech work (in a lesson situation), the actualization of value concepts (honor, conscience, happiness), the level of age development of language ability and speech competence of writers. The analysis of text categories showed their different representation and significance for writers.

text, essay by schoolchildren, categories of text, communicative, structural, semantic, cognitive organization of the text, content-factual informational content, content-conceptual informational value