Lietuvių kalba kaip klaida. Raštingumo samprata ir kalbos taisymai mokykloje

• Čičirkaitė, Ramunė
• Nevinskaitė, Laima
• Vaicekauskienė, Loreta
• Vukotić, Vuk

LTKnygos objektas – mokyklinių rašto darbų kalbos variantiškumas ir jo taisymai. Variantiškumu čia laikomos įvairios, įvairių kalbos lygmenų (rašybos, gramatikos, stiliaus, žodyno) raiškos formos, kurias mokytojai taiso kaip netinkamus variantus, remdamiesi vadovėliuose ar vaizduotėje esančia „geresnės“ raiškos norma. Tyrimo teorinė prielaida ir tikslas – pasiaiškinti, kaip, kuo remiantis nuo pradinių iki baigiamųjų mokyklos klasių taisomi rašybos, gramatikos, žodyno ir stiliaus variantai ir kodėl kalbos vienodinimo tikrovėje mokinių rašytinė kalba vis tiek išlieka įvairi. Kitaip sakant, tiriama ne tik raštingumo, bet ir „kalbos klaidos“ samprata, ne tik kognityvinių ir socialinių priežasčių lemiamos kalbos varijavimo priežastys, bet ir kalbos standartizavimo idėjos, normos ir nenormalumo suvokimas, institucionalizuota galia kvalifikuoti ir klasifikuoti socialines raštingumo praktikas. Kritinė analizė apima būtent tuos kalbos mokymo proceso ir nuostatų aspektus, kurie lemia, kad lietuvių kalba mokykloje iš esmės paverčiama klaida. [Iš Įvado]

ENThe title of this special issue Language as an Error is deliberately chosen to illustrate its main theoretical purpose. It seeks to critically intervene in the dominant normativist (or prescriptivist) paradigm of school literacy studies in Lithuania by showing the advantages of a (socio)linguistically informed approach to literacy development. The normativist perspective on literacy has as its epistemological basis only the ‘standard Lithuanian language,’ an abstract system of various rules prescribed by language authorities, called ‘the linguistic norm’ (kalbos norma) or simply ‘the norm’ (norma). In empirical terms, it seeks merely to identify ‘deviations from the norm,’ also called ‘language errors.’ Normativism is not specific to the Lithuanian schooling system and can be found amongst language teaching practitioners globally: it stems from the modernist idea that language can be fully standardised and that such standardization will have positive effects on society. Nor is the public ideology of school literacy specifically Lithuanian. The so-called problem of declining literacy rates of pupils has been a commonplace topic in media for decades around the globe. The blame usually lies with students and teachers who have not learned (or taught how) to properly adopt the standard. However, Lithuania is one of the few places where such undocumented beliefs have acquired the status of scientific discipline during the Soviet period, which goes by the name ‘Language Culture’ or ‘Sprachkultur’ (kalbos kultūra). Its empirical scope extends to identifying ‘deviations from the norm’ in the educational system, as well as printed and broadcast media, any type of literature; in fact, in all public use of language. The norms themselves are documented in detailed accounts of lexical, grammar, word formation ‘errors’ and even deviations in standard pronunciation and accentuation of words.And while this particular type of ‘errors’ is only one externally determined source for correcting school writing, the long presence of prescriptivist practices in society has influenced the general approach to teaching linguistic expression, which has become highly formalised and error-oriented. Since ‘the norm’ is both the starting and the end point of analysis, such an approach cannot tell anything about the actual language production amongst school pupils, nor can it explain the reasons behind the various linguistic choices made by them. This special issue features a study consisting of four main contributions where (socio)linguistically informed approaches to school literacy are presented, one theoretical and three empirical. The authors seek to explore pupils’ written language practices by focusing on variation in spelling, morphology and syntax, word choice as well as stylistic expression, as corrected by teachers, and approach the corrections in terms of language normalisation ideology. The data for the empirical contributions were retrieved from an anonymised database Rašinėliai (‘School Essays’) which some of the authors of the study have been collecting since 2014 for the purpose of school writing research in Lithuania. The database is based on various types of authentic texts for the subject Lithuanian language and literature, encompassing primary and upper secondary schools from different parts of the country. The pupils’ texts in the database are annotated by year, location, author’s gender, genre, grade and more. The database covers a period of nine decades (1930–2021), however, most of the essays are from the post- World War II period, which is represented in the analysis in this study. At the time the study was conducted, the researchers could choose among more than 7,500 PDF files documenting writing by almost 950 different pupils between 1st and 12th grades, of which almost 80% were teacher-corrected. [...].The study is concluded with a discussion on school literacy as a multidimensional phenomenon and the limits of prescriptive pedagogy to the teaching of literacy. Pedagogical and didactic alternatives are proposed, and the relationship of the school tradition to contexts outside the school including the future cultural developments is discussed. Thus, the study documents the history of formal literacy education in Lithuania in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries with authentic empirical data, it critically assesses the hitherto unexamined notion of school literacy and the concept of language ‘error’ in the light of the practice of language correction, and it weighs up the implications of the cultural tradition of normalisation of language and speakers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the field of sociolinguistics of literacy of such scope and nature, where the variation of pupils’ written language and its potential causes are analysed from the perspective of teachers’ corrections. On the other hand, the fact that variation was studied essentially only through teachers’ corrections is of course an important caveat for understanding the study’s findings. The pupils who adapt more easily to the requirements of Lithuanian literacy teaching, who do not make ‘errors’ in the eyes of the teachers, were left out of the analysis, although they might have revealed another side of the Lithuanian tradition of teaching writing. [...]. [From the publication]