On November 9, 2018, Henrietta Grigorievna Granik turned 90 years old. On the day of the glorious anniversary, the “Guild of Literature Writers” - an association that unites everyone who knows the value of an accurate and figurative word, who works creatively with it - congratulates the wonderful psychologist and philologist, who paved the way for hundreds of thousands of wordsmiths to the Word, Literacy, the Book, on his birthday !

Who is Henrietta Grigorievna Granik?

According to the official certificate, G.G. Granik is a Doctor of Psychology, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Education, twice laureate of the Government of the Russian Federation, head of the group of psychological foundations for constructing school textbooks at the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education. Born in Ulan-Ude into a family of employees. After the end of the Great Patriotic War, she worked for three years as a senior pioneer leader at school No. 81 in the Krasnopresnensky district of Moscow. After graduating from the Moscow State Correspondence Pedagogical Institute (1959), she became a teacher of Russian language and literature, and then a district methodologist. In 1963 G.G. Granik came to the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR (now the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education), to the laboratory of programmed learning, where for a number of years she worked on the psychological foundations of creating problem-based textbooks in the Russian language. In 1965 G.G. Granik defended her PhD thesis on educational psychology “Formation of mental work techniques in schoolchildren in the process of developing spelling skills,” and in 1980 she defended her doctoral dissertation on the topic “Psychological model of the process of developing punctuation skills.”

The life of the hero of the day was forever connected with school, with the problems of creating a school textbook. Under the scientific leadership of Rita Grigorievna and with her direct participation, 45 textbooks and 10 educational books on the Russian language were created (the most famous: “Secrets of Punctuation” (1987), “Secrets of Spelling” (1991), “Speech, Language and Secrets of Punctuation” (1995 ), “Punctuation” (1998), “Russian language. Syntax and punctuation” (2002)); 12 educational books on literature and literary reading (“Journey to the Land of Books.” In 4 books” (1998, 2007, 2018), “And... about Pushkin again” (1999), “Playwrights, dramaturgy, theater” (2001 ), “Literature. Learning to understand literary text: Workbook for grades 8-11” (1999, 2001), “Russian literature: from epics to Krylov” (2007), “I am different” (M.Yu. 2011), “A.S. Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin.” (2016), “A.S. Pushkin, his friends and contemporaries” (2018).

G.G. Granik managed to make teaching the Russian language not only effective, but also “understanding” and super interesting. Children read her textbooks like “The Count of Monte Cristo” (this was the original intention). With the only difference - modern children do not read “Count...”, but Russian language textbooks by G.G. Granik is read, studied, called a favorite school textbook.

The personality of Rita Grigorievna happily combines a theoretical scientist, the founder of the scientific school of psychological problems in a school textbook, and a practical scientist. She developed not only the theoretical foundations of a new type of textbook (reflected in numerous collective monographs, including the latest “How to teach Russian language and literature to modern schoolchildren? A school textbook today” (M.-SPb.: Nestor-Istoriya, 2018), but and the textbooks themselves were created (the main result of the 55-year activity of the hero of the day is the educational complex “Russian language. Grades 1-9. Under the general editorship of G.G. Granik”).

Understanding that it is necessary to teach in a new way not only students, but also teachers, Rita Grigorievna from the very beginning began to write books for practicing teachers. She is the author and scientific editor of a series of books that discuss psychological and pedagogical techniques for students working with a textbook, educational and fiction books (“Teacher, textbook and schoolchildren” (1977), “How to teach a schoolchild to work with a textbook” (1987), “When a book teaches” (1988, 1991), “How to teach how to work with a book” (1995, 2007), “The Road to a Book” (1996), etc.).

In total, G.G. Granik has published over 300 works, among them thirty (not counting textbooks) smart books that are very necessary for schools, numerous publications on educational psychology, psychodidactics of school textbooks, psychological problems of teaching Russian language and literature, issues of reading and understanding text...

We wish Rita Grigorievna health, strength, prosperity, further creative success and ups!

Congratulations from Irina Nikolaevna Evlampieva

Henrietta Grigorievna Granik. We've never met. We have been meeting constantly since 1979, from our first teaching practice, when I realized with horror before class that in my third year of philology, I didn’t understand what to talk about with children in class, or how to work so that they understood what was obvious to me. The book “Secrets of Spelling” helped me, like many others then. The book revealed secrets not only of the history of the word and its structure, but also the secrets of psychology and methodology. The discovery was made that what seemed obvious to me, in my student self-confidence, was not at all obvious. It was from then on that I gradually began to understand that the secret of a successful lesson is in a joint search.

I've been working at school for a long time. When the opportunity to choose a textbook arose, I immediately got involved in this search. Each of the authors of school textbooks manifests itself in them in different ways: someone loves the Russian language as a science about language and enthusiastically talks about that science, someone cares about the poor child and “without loading him up” with unnecessary theory, turns to practical literacy, someone respects the child’s personality and gives the opportunity to choose an educational path. Henrietta Grigorievna Granik’s textbooks not only contain everything listed above in the system, but also provide the opportunity to know oneself, study the capabilities of the brain and memory.

I would really like to congratulate Henrietta Grigorievna on her birthday and wish her health and creative exploration, and for all of us the return of her wonderful textbook from the electronic underground to our school desks.

The problem of understanding text today is literally in the air. It is studied by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, linguists, literary scholars, methodologists and many others. One of the first among scientific teams in our country, more than forty years ago, was the psychologist-scientists from the laboratory “Problems of constructing school textbooks” of the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education, and above all G.G. Granik, S.M. Bondarenko, L.A. End. Even then it became clear that without solving this problem, not a single educational concept, not a single specific educational program would work. The proposed work, or more precisely, a series of articles by a team of authors under the scientific guidance of Academician. RAO G.G. Granik, is devoted to the problems of understanding the text and, we hope, will help the teacher answer the question: “How to teach schoolchildren to understand the text?”

G.G. GRANIK, N.A. BORISENKO

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT IN LESSONS
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

The problem of reading and comprehension, as paradoxical as it may sound, has really worried only a few teachers for many years. It is trivial today to say that our country in the past was the most reading country in the world, that our children, unlike “their” children, read, and read a lot.

And suddenly, against the backdrop of general “well-being” with reading, the data from PISA reports 1 thundered like a bolt from the blue. At first, the results were not made public, and then, it seems, there was not a single professional publication left that would not publish materials testifying to our problems with reading literacy. Let us clarify what is under reading literacy The PISA study understands a person’s ability to comprehend written texts and reflect on them. In other words, the ability to understand and interpret text. It is this ability that is the main component of modern human literacy. And not what we often mean by this term - spelling and punctuation literacy and reading technique.

Let us briefly recall the main figures.

The results of the first testing (PISA-2000) showed that Russian fifteen-year-old schoolchildren in terms of reading literacy were in 27th–29th place among 32 industrialized countries of the world. In the next testing (2003), we took 32–34th places now among 41 participating countries, sharing them with Turkey and Uruguay. There are no data for 2006 yet, but it is already clear that our achievements in the field of reading literacy are not getting better from year to year.

PISA, in fact, played the role of an alarm and made people realize the seriousness of the problem of reading and comprehension. However, it must be said that specialists in the field of education were sounding the alarm and working on this problem long before the international survey. As they say, there is no prophet in his own country.

Back in the early 70s. last century, a special survey was conducted in which students from grades 4 to 10 from different schools in Moscow (about a thousand people in total) participated. The results were stunning: only 0.3% of the surveyed schoolchildren knew the most basic techniques for understanding text. The figure cannot but surprise even a person who knows school reality well.

The same results were obtained ten years later during a comprehensive examination organized by the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, in which psychologists, methodologists and physiologists participated. Both surveys were conducted on scientific, educational and educational texts in the humanities.

Psychologist and children's poet Vadim Levin tested the understanding of literary texts and found that only 6% of children correctly understood the meaning of what they read.

This is what psychologists write in one of the books after analyzing this data: “6% is more than 0.3%. But how little this is! These numbers call out to all of us and require immediate action. It would seem that the alarm signal is primarily addressed to the teacher. It is he who should rush into the classroom and immediately begin to teach his students how to work with the book” 2.

Didn't rush, didn't start. At the same time, little has changed in school reality since then. Here's the latest data on student comprehension from L.A.'s study. Mosunova: an adequate level of understanding is characteristic of only 9.4% of subjects 3.

So the results of international and domestic studies are equally disappointing. Although they talked about different things. The PISA studies tested a type of understanding that can, in our opinion, be called pragmatic understanding. Let us explain what we mean. Schoolchildren worked with texts of different types and genres, but, unlike the literary and journalistic texts familiar to our students, the PISA tasks offered instructional texts, advertisements, product labels, job application forms, and even texts about choosing shirts and scheduling flights, rules for using the telephone in a hotel, operating a refrigerator...

It has already been noted more than once that Russian schoolchildren rarely encounter such texts in their academic work and outside of school. The conclusion was this: we are not preparing students for life. At the same time, they lost sight of the fact that due to different ways of life, different living conditions, these texts simply turned out to be irrelevant for our teenagers.

Undoubtedly, the ability to work with everyday texts is necessary for every modern person to navigate life around him. And, of course, this must be taught. However, it is no secret that many outstanding people are often helpless in the most ordinary, everyday situations. Meanwhile, these people are competent in solving intellectual problems. And hardly anyone would dare to accuse them of a low level of literacy and understanding.

And here again the eternal question arises about the goals of education, about what we want to get “as a result.” If we want to raise a person who is successful in life, a business person of the “Western” type, who cares primarily about his material security, that’s one thing. But if our goal is the preservation of culture, the education of a cultured person, the education of a Reader, a person who can understand a text, and, first of all, a literary text, this is completely different. This, however, does not mean at all that a cultured person should not think about his material security, about his daily bread. We are talking only about placing accents.

But is the stated goal really so important - the education of a cultured person, the education of the Reader? Or can we get by with goals that are more pragmatic and more in demand in modern society?

Fazil Iskander answers this question in his interview with the Russian Language newspaper: “If culture does not take its main place, very dramatic events await us and, perhaps, even the complete degeneration of humanity.” By culture, the writer means “first of all, of course, culture expressed in literature” 4, in a literary text. And working with text is not only the lessons of the school subject “literature”, to the same extent this also applies to the school subject “Russian language”, in other words, to philology.

Let's consider what we mean by the word philology. As you know, it came from the Greek language and its literal translation means “I love the word” ( phileo– I love + logos- word). Love is assumed both for the word of everyday speech and for the word of fiction, when a person communicates with a book, and love for the word of another people, when people belonging to different nations communicate (naturally, provided they speak a foreign language).

However, one cannot but agree with S.I. Gindin, what is the semantic content of the term philology does not have a completely clear established content. That is why it acquired new meanings over time.

Without going into all the intricacies of research in this area, let us analyze the views of outstanding philologists on philology itself.

First of all, let us touch upon the ideas of G.O. Vinokura on the content of the concept of “philology”. The thought of this area of ​​knowledge runs through the scientist’s entire creative life, and his point of view has changed more than once. Differences in the interpretation of G.O. Vinokur, the subject of philology can be traced in the works of S.I. Gindin. These changes in points of view during different periods of the scientist’s life fit exactly into the title of S.I.’s study. Gindin “From art to text and from science to art: G.O. Vinokur in thought about the subject and status of philology” 5. So, if in the 1930s–1940s. G.O. Vinokur says that philology is an encyclopedia, a collection sciences about culture, then in recent works the scientist comes to the idea that philology is art reading, in which the main thing is “complete understanding<…>, the fullness of understanding." He writes: “Philology commands to know and understand everything, and this is its great significance in the history of human culture” 6.

A special role in understanding the text by G.O. Vinokur sees “slow reading”, the origins of which he finds in F. Nietzsche.

Regardless of how G.O. interprets Vinokur a special field of knowledge - as a science or as an art - the thought of a scientist is important to us, that philology has cultural and educational significance associated with understanding the text.

By philology he understands “the art of reading” and L.V. Shcherba. He writes: “...by philology we should ultimately mean the art of understanding and interpreting difficult texts...”. The scientist created excellent examples of linguistic interpretation of texts. He showed how to use all the linguistic clues to understand a text, and warned literary scholars against the danger of “talking about ideas that they may have incorrectly read from the text” 7 .

M.L. Gasparov, defining the concept of “philology,” directly says that philology is “the science of understanding.” At the same time, he emphasizes: “There are no eternal values, there are only temporary ones.” Indeed, every era has its own value system. “When we pick up a classic book,” writes M.L. Gasparov, then we avoid asking ourselves the simplest question: for whom was it written? Because we know the simplest answer to it: not for us.” “It is unknown,” the scientist further writes, “how Horace imagined those who would read him centuries later, but it is certainly clear that not you and me” 8 .

In order to overcome the historical distance that separates us from a work of art and understand it, we need, according to M.L. Gasparov, “put aside your own value system for a while.” It is necessary to “renounce yourself and dissolve in your high interlocutor.” And this presupposes a high level of culture of the reader. We should also dwell on the thoughts of M.L. Gasparov that pleasure and understanding are different things.

Psychologist B.M. writes about the relationship between understanding and emotions. Teplov: “To understand a work of art means first of all to feel it, to experience it emotionally and, on this basis, to reflect on it.” But for this, again, it is necessary that the reader has a high level of culture.

But here is the point of view on the philology of S.S. Averintseva. He considers philology as a “service of understanding”, a “service” with the “text”, which helps fulfill one of the main human tasks - “to understand another person (and another culture, another era) ...” 9. According to S.S. Averintsev, philology “absorbs into its horizons the entire breadth and depth of human existence and continues to live not as a particular science, delimited in its subject matter from history, linguistics and literary criticism, but as a scientific principle, as<...>a form of knowledge that is determined not so much by the boundaries of the subject as by the approach to it.” S.S. Averintsev, speaking about philology as a scientific principle, as a form of knowledge, also believes that it is based on human culture and understanding in the broad sense of the word.

What is culture?

In his work “Conversations about Russian Culture” Yu.M. Lotman writes that the concept of “culture” is very capacious: it “includes morality, the whole range of ideas, human creativity, and much more” 10 . It should be noted that, speaking about culture, Yu.M. Lotman first of all includes in this concept moral. Morality should also be inherent in philology. Commenting on the thought of Yu.M. Lotman on the morality of philology, M.L. Gasparov writes that not only its path is moral in philology, but also its goal: “it weans a person from spiritual egocentrism.”

Thus, when creating a school philology course, the problem of creating an “active cultural fund” (the concept was introduced by D.S. Likhachev) and the problem of understanding come to the fore.

Raising a cultured person, a person who can understand text, is long and painstaking work, and it can be carried out using different materials and in different forms (see articles by O.V. Soboleva and S.A. Shapoval in this issue of the newspaper “Russian Language” , as well as the works of M.A. Krongauz, N.A. Shapiro, etc.).

Some techniques for teaching text comprehension

FIRST TYPE OF TASKS *
“We work in a forecasting bureau”

As you know, most schoolchildren first write down the sentence and only then add punctuation. In order for the student to make signs as he writes, special prediction tasks were invented. By completing such tasks, schoolchildren not only train their punctuation skills, but - just as important - learn to extract meaning from each element of a sentence, see the general structure of a sentence and construct a statement in a language of general meaning.

* It should be noted that at the same time such tasks are aimed at developing students’ psychological mechanisms of punctuation literacy.

Let us show how a forecasting task can be introduced by a teacher in a lesson.

“Now we will get acquainted with a new type of tasks. You will have to according to the first words of the sentence predict (predict, foresee, predict) both its syntactic structure and general meaning. This will allow you to add punctuation as you write. The situation when you do not know the entire text at once arises very often: whether you are writing a summary, or an essay, or some other creative work. In life, outside the walls of school, you will create your own texts: letters, statements, plans, reports, articles... And a literate person, of course, puts punctuation marks in the process of creating his own text.”

Now let's see how such tasks are performed. The first words of the sentence are given: The woman who...

Having written these words, you immediately understand: the sentence is complex. Woman - subject in the main part, which - a conjunctive word as the subject of a subordinate clause. Then we can assume one of two options:

1) the sentence is complex, the subordinate part is in the middle of the main part;

2) the first part is a nominative (noun) sentence, the second part is a subordinate clause.

Complete this “segment” of the sentence, filling it with specific content (in two different ways).

Let’s look at another “segment” of the sentence: Always self-possessed and calm......

Exercise. Make a sentence outline for this “segment” and place punctuation marks in it. Then continue the sentence, conveying the general meaning. Please note that you cannot use specific words.

It will turn out like this:

Always self-possessed and calm, someone male did something differently, as always, not as usual.

..., someone male did something, as always, as usual, because he is as he is said.

Conclusion: in any of the options the definition is isolated: after the words Always composed and calm a comma is added. In the first case, the definition has the additional meaning of concession, in the second - reasons.

We provide training material for working with “segments” of sentences. Such tasks can be included in almost every lesson.

Topic: “Punctuation marks
in a complex sentence."

Exercise. Try to predict the grammatical structure and general meaning of a sentence if it begins with these words. Place punctuation marks in the “segments”. Create proposal outlines.

1) Those that...... 2) If it's hot... 3) Something happened...... 4) What happened...... 5) When dad...... 6) In the morning when dad......

Topic: “Punctuation marks
in sentences connected by a “dangerous” conjunction And».

Exercise. Work as fortune tellers! Based on the “segment”, determine its general content and syntactic structure. Remember that a “segment” can have at least two options. Continue the “segments” with specific words, add punctuation marks.

I got angry and said that I was already an adult and... This segment can be continued in two ways: 1) I got angry and said that I was already an adult and I wouldn’t listen to anyone. Or: 2) I got angry, said that I was already an adult, and left the room.

1) The girl got off the train and looked for someone on the platform... 2) The curtain rose and... 3) A butterfly sat on the dry grass in front of the window and after sitting for a while... 4) The sun penetrated through the skylight of the porthole and...

Topics: “Isolation of minor members of a sentence”, “Repetition of a complex sentence”.

Exercise. Make a written forecast of the “segments” of the sentence. Place punctuation marks in them.

When schoolchildren drop out... – the sentence begins with a subordinating conjunction When, the conjunction signals that this is the subordinate part of a complex sentence. It is complicated by a separate circumstance, expressed by the participle phrase, therefore, before the participle throwing I put a comma and wait for the turn to end so I can put the second comma. Then I wait for the subordinate clause to end, after which I also put a comma.

1) A young man brought up in strict rules is not... 2) ...a slow and clumsy brother is still... 3) When we are tired... 4) He watched as he moved... 5) ...answered reluctantly because...
6) Reading while lying down is harmful because... 7) ...I was seriously scared but didn’t want to...

SECOND TYPE OF TASKS
“Decipher the sentence”, or
“We make up a story according to a sentence”

Schoolchildren are given a separate sentence of an unknown text and are tasked with extracting from it all the information contained in it. This information needs to be presented in the form of a coherent story.

Here is a fragment of a lesson in which a new type of task is introduced.

“Imagine that you were handed a telegram with a short message: Arrival is postponed, I will inform Kostya

What's behind this telegram? Let's try to extract as much information from it as possible.

Obviously, Kostya had to come to you at a certain time. However, something happened that prevented him from doing this. Kostya was forced to postpone his arrival. Circumstances, apparently, are such that even now he cannot say exactly when he will arrive. In order not to keep you constantly waiting, he decided to inform you of the departure date when there is some certainty.

As you can see, we were able to “decipher” the telegram because we understood what was behind its words. We have a whole story.

Now let's learn how to extract as much information as possible from one sentence. To do this, we came up with a task that we called “Decipher the sentence.”

When performing this task, you need to look closely at every word: after all, every word, even the smallest one, sends us its own signal. For example, the word If tells us that we are not talking about what happened or will actually happen, but about what could happen under certain conditions.

Words although, despite show that an action occurs in spite of something.

Sometimes you need to pay special attention to a phrase. You read: through thick and thin– and it immediately becomes clear: something must happen or someone must do something without fail.

If, when decoding a sentence, you catch all its signals, you should have a short story. In this case, two conditions must be met:

1) Completely “extract” the meaning from each word and phrase. But…

2) You cannot invent something that cannot be learned from the sentence. Otherwise, you will fantasize, starting from the proposal, but in front of you there is absolutely other task.

Now try your hand at a sentence, the “segment” from which you are already familiar with:

Always self-possessed and calm, this time the boss revealed his true temperament.

But first, make sure you understand the meaning of the words in the sentence (seasoned, genuine, temperament).

Now write a story based on the sentence.

Here is the story of one of the students:

Once upon a time there lived a smart, but hot and quick-tempered man. He became the boss. This means that he led people. Since he was an intelligent man, he understood that working with people requires endurance and calmness. And he cultivated these qualities in himself, so that no one suspected his true temperament. However, one day something unusual happened, out of the ordinary, and the boss could not restrain himself. In the presence of people, he discovered his true character.

If the children got a different option, there is nothing wrong with that. The main thing is that students can prove that the meaning they “drawn out” is really contained in this sentence, and the editing of the text can be very different.

How to teach a child to extract meaning from a sentence? Learning primarily lies in the formulation of the task itself. Students should be focused on the fact that in order to understand, it is necessary to extract the full meaning from each element of the text separately and from their interrelationships - from all the signals that the text sends. In addition, what is needed is not episodic, but systematic training in such work.

We provide training material for developing the ability to write a story based on a sentence. The task in all cases will be general: “Decipher the sentence, reading every word of it. Complete the task in writing. Then compare your answer with what one student wrote. We think he did it well."

1) I raised my head to the ceiling so that the tears would roll back into me.

(The sentence is taken from a story by V. Dragunsky, but schoolchildren are not informed about this.)

Possible answer

There was a boy in some room. Someone must have offended him or something happened that really upset him. And he began to cry. The boy did not want others to see his tears. Maybe someone entered the room, and the boy decided to get rid of his tears in such an unusual way: to roll them back.

2) His mother hugged him and cried with joy, and he hugged her and affectionately nodded his head to all the old furniture.

(The sentence is taken from a fairy tale by H. C. Andersen.)

Answer

Let's assume that it was a son and mother. They had not seen each other for a very long time, apparently many years. Maybe the son was at war or on a long journey, or maybe he studied or worked away from home for several years. If his life apart from his mother had led to bad results, their meeting would have been overshadowed. But the meeting was joyful - it means that he returned with some success. And the mother is happy to meet him and that he is doing well. And he is happy to see his mother and the house he hasn’t been to for a long time.

3) The boy realized that he would never feel completely happy as long as this dog catcher existed in the city.

(The sentence is taken from the story of F. Iskander.)

Answer

The boy loved and pitied dogs. Maybe he had his own dog, which became his friend. But then a dog catcher appeared in the city. Perhaps the boy saw how dogs were caught and how cruelty was shown to them. And while there was a dog catcher in the city, the boy was not left with a feeling of anxiety for the fate of the city dogs and, perhaps, for the fate of his four-legged favorite.

We have described only some of the techniques with which you can develop the psychological mechanisms of understanding text 11 . In fact, there are many more of them. The proposed tasks can serve as a model for the teacher to create exercises taking into account the level of development of the class. If the teacher realizes the significance of this work, his own creativity will allow him to create various tasks using other texts.

1 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) – International program for assessing the educational achievements of students. The newspaper “Russian Language” wrote about the results of the PISA-2000 study in No. 14–15/2005.

2 Granik G.G., Bondarenko S.M., Kontsevaya L.A. How to teach schoolchildren with a textbook. M., 1987.
pp. 4–5.

3 Mosunova L.A.. Structure and development of semantic understanding of literary texts. M., 2006. P. 249.

4 See: Russian language, No. 8/2004.

5 Gindin S.I.. Decree. Op. // Vinokur G.O. Introduction to the study of philological sciences. M.: Nauka, 2000.

6 Vinokur G.O. Introduction to the study of philological sciences. M.: Nauka, 2000. pp. 88–89.

7 Shcherba L.V. Experiments in linguistic interpretation of poems // Selected works on the Russian language. M., 1959.

8 Gasparov M.L. Notes and extracts. M.: New Literary Review, 2000. P. 98 ff.

9 Averintsev S.S.. Philology // Linguistic encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1990. P. 545.

10 Lotman Yu.M. Conversations about Russian culture. S. 5.

11 More details about the task “Deciphering the meaning” can be found in the book : Granik G.G., Kontsevaya L.A., Bondarenko S.M., Shapoval S.A.. Literature: Problem book-workshop for grades 8–11. / Ser. “Learning to understand a literary text” / G.G. Granik. M., 2001. – P. 59–80.

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF G. G. GRANIK

On November 9, 1998, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Education Henrietta Grigorievna Granik turned 70 years old. For 35 of these years, she has been working at the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education, where she has worked her way up from a junior researcher to a chief researcher and head of the “Construction of school textbooks” group. The theoretical works of G. G. Granik formed the basis of a unified course in Russian language and literature: “Russian Philology”. In total, she published 168 works, the main of which are devoted to the problem of the formation of psychological mechanisms of literate speech and the problem of understanding text by schoolchildren. The team, led by G. G. Granik, became a laureate of the Government of the Russian Federation in 1997.

Colleagues and the editorial board of the magazine wish Henrietta Grigorievna to remain a happy owner of the joy of creativity, which is considered special wisdom, as well as true friends and like-minded people.

We asked G.G. Granik to answer the questions that interested us. The text of this conversation is published below.

Rita Grigorievna, we would like to ask you a traditional question: how did you come to psychological science? After all, by basic education you are a teacher of Russian language and literature?

I often asked myself this question. I dreamed that I would become... Whatever I dreamed of being! But... not a teacher. I simply didn’t know what psychology was at that time.

An amazing chain of events led me to school early on.

Soon after the end of World War II, I was hit by a truck. And at that moment, when the rear wheel of the five-ton truck began to run into me, my entire short seventeen-year life flashed before me instantly, as if in accelerated frames of a film. The doctors had no hope that I would survive. And during the short breaks, when after the next injection the pain subsided a little, I was tormented by the question: how could so many events happen at such a speed? And why did they rush by?

These “psychological” questions tormented me for many years, and I pestered everyone with them. It’s interesting that when, having got to the Psychological Institute, I asked them to Professor Pyotr Alekseevich Shevarev, he said: “Yes, it happens.” That's all I learned about this phenomenon. I hope that someday psychology will answer these questions first.

After the accident, I was not allowed to study, and soon the district Komsomol committee sent me to work as a senior pioneer leader.

Almost all the parents of the students (practically only mothers: fathers either died at the front or abandoned their families) were associated with work at Trekhgorka. And the life of the half-starved students (it was 1947) was spent mainly at school.

I worked here for three years. These years were the best of my life, and they forever connected me with school. The highest reward, which still warms me to this day, were the words of one schoolgirl: “Rita, you gave us childhood.” She said them while speaking at a school reunion.

I remember funny episodes that characterize many people of my generation. One day they called the school from the Komsomol district committee and asked me to receive an award for good work, and they gave me a bonus of 30 rubles. This was my monthly salary. We should be glad: this is not superfluous for a family with four children, and I am the eldest, a family that, even in those “card” times, stood out for its poverty. But I was upset and said: “I thought they would give me a certificate, and you would give me money.” I cannot describe the amazement on the faces of the district committee workers.

After graduating from the Pedagogical Institute, I became a teacher of Russian language and literature, and then a regional methodologist.

No less amazing events brought me to the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.

I already wrote in a magazine about my funny meeting with Professor Dmitry Nikolaevich Bogoyavlensky (see: Vopr. psychol. 1994. No. 2. P. 51).

Dmitry Nikolaevich brought me to the institute, where I have worked for more than 35 years.

You see how “bizarre” my path into psychology was.

What scientific problems have you been working on all these years?

Before answering this question, I must say that by coincidence of a number of circumstances, I entered the laboratory of programmed training, which was then just being created by L. N. Landa. And for a number of years in this laboratory I worked on the psychological problems of creating special problem-programmed school textbooks in the Russian language. I must say that by the time I arrived at the institute, I had already completed work on my candidate’s dissertation on methods of teaching spelling. However, A. A. Smirnov called me and said that at the Institute of Psychology you need to be a psychologist. I was assigned to P.A. Shevarev, and I had to, as it were, “pass” each of the significant monographs of psychologists; “passing” took place in the form of a conversation. Often Pyotr Alekseevich chose some psychological problem for conversation. These were very interesting meetings that taught me a lot. But to those who knew Pyotr Alekseevich Shevarev, there is no need to explain how difficult this school was. Only after such a “psychology course” was I allowed

take the exam. And then I prepared and defended a new dissertation on educational psychology: “Formation of mental work techniques in schoolchildren in the process of developing spelling skills” (1963) (at that time I could not have known that I would have to defend my doctoral dissertation twice).

During these same years, my friendly relations arose with Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin, who came up with the idea of ​​using textbooks of various types as a tool for psychological research.

The need to create a new type of textbook was dictated by the need to build education on the basis of the latest linguistic and psychological-didactic knowledge and modern conditions of mass education: the complexity of its goals and subject content, different levels of teacher training, the existence of different types of schools, the increasing number of students forced to miss school for health reasons or study at home.

It is known that throughout the existence of textbooks, they practically performed two functions: 1) the function of consolidating the theoretical knowledge acquired in the classroom and 2) the function of a “simulator”. This determined the structure of textbooks in use to this day: a summary presentation of the material explained by the teacher in class, tables, diagrams, training tasks that facilitate the consolidation of knowledge and the development of certain skills.

It is this idea of ​​​​the functional load of the textbook that formed the basis of our textbook, where for the first time an attempt is made, through the textbook itself, to help the teacher form and develop such mental processes and human properties as thinking, memory, attention, imagination, observation, written and oral speech, self-control and etc.

The textbook will also solve the problem of arousing and maintaining cognitive interest among schoolchildren. Particular attention will be paid to the problem of working with a book: the formation of this skill will be carried out with the help of the textbook itself.

The new functions of the textbook required the creation of a special structure for it. The presentation of the material in it is directly addressed to the student and represents a complex combination of problem-based and explanatory illustrative teaching methods. The textbook contains answers for self-monitoring of the progress of assignments.

Quite early on, I realized that it was impossible for one person to cope with the task of creating different types of textbooks and conducting diverse experiments on them. And then I decide to give lectures and conduct seminars at the City and Regional Teacher Training Institutes. As a result of this work, I was able to create a seminar for teachers at our Psychological Institute and the All-Union Pedagogical Society. The purpose of the seminar was to prepare teachers who would master the achievements of science of the 20th century. both in the field of educational psychology and linguistics. Only such specialists could become the authors of textbooks of a new type. And only in this way could trained teachers conduct systematic multifaceted experimental work in the natural conditions of classroom teaching.

Lectures on linguistics were given by such specialists as Yu. D. Apresyan and V. P. Shiryaev. I gave lectures on psychology. The seminar lasted for more than ten years. My co-authors and friends “came out” of it, these are, first of all: S. M. Bondarenko, L. A. Kontsevaya, S. S. Levitina, E. L. Solomonova, E. D. Kin.

It was a great joy for all of us to be awarded the prize. K. D. Ushinsky for the creation of experimental textbooks on syntax and punctuation of the Russian language. In the history of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, this was the first time that teachers received the prize (of the 10 authors, 6 were teachers).

For many years, my scientific interests have been related to the problems of the formation of psychological mechanisms of speech. I defended my doctoral dissertation: “Psychological model of the process of formation of punctuation skills” (1985). These studies led me and my colleagues to the problem of understanding a literary text.

Understanding well that the implementation of research results into school practice is associated with the development of an apparatus for their implementation, we were forced to work a lot on these complex problems. They turned out to be incredibly difficult.

As you can see, no matter what psychological problems I and my colleagues have

friends had to study, they were all dictated by the school’s orders.

My life, as I said, in science is inseparable from school.

Rita Grigorievna, what are you doing now?

Our team is currently busy with the problem of synthesizing the Russian language and literature.

The synthesis of Russian language and literature is a long-standing dream of scientists and advanced teachers. Hopelessly separated, these two school subjects not only do not feed each other, but also cannot fully solve the problems facing each of them. Meanwhile, these areas of knowledge have a common subject of study. This is the word. The processes underlying the living functioning of language (both in oral and written speech) and the perception of a literary text are the same. This is the whole set of forecasting processes: “probabilistic forecasting”, “variable forecasting”, “anticipation”, “installation”, etc.

The research we conducted made it possible to develop a holistic, consistent basis for creating textbooks on Russian philology.

The first two books we created on this basis, “Russian Philology,” and books for teachers, “How to teach how to work with a book” and “The Road to a Book,” were awarded the Russian Government Prize for 1997.

source unknown

Russian psychologist, teacher, Doctor of Psychology (1981), professor, full member of the Russian Academy of Education (1995).

G.G. Granik was born in Ulan-Ude into a family of employees (father, Grigory Grigorievich, was an engineer; mother, Etolia Alexandrovna, was a housewife). After the end of the Great Patriotic War, Henrietta Grigorievna got into a serious car accident and for a long time could neither study nor work. After recovery, she worked for three years as a senior pioneer leader at school No. 81 in the Krasnopresnensky district of Moscow. She still considers these years to be the best in her life, and the words of her former pioneers: “Rita, you gave us childhood” are the highest reward that warms her all her life.

Having graduated from the Moscow State Correspondence Pedagogical Institute (1959), G.G. Granik became a teacher of Russian language and literature, and then a district methodologist. Since then, she has forever devoted her life to the problems of school and, above all, to the problems of creating textbooks. In the early 1960s. G.G. Granik was hired as a junior researcher at the Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in the laboratory of programmed learning.

In 1963, she defended her PhD thesis on the topic “Formation of mental work techniques in schoolchildren in the process of developing spelling skills.” Then she worked and is working on the creation of textbooks on the Russian language (first - problem-based, and then - textbooks of a new type). At this time, the problem of the school textbook as a special theoretical-experimental problem in psychological science, although posed, was not essentially developed.

At the same time, as is known, back in the early twentieth century. a discussion took place on this topic: some of its participants believed that the textbook should have the function of consolidating the knowledge acquired by the student in the classroom, should become a reference textbook, a training textbook; others believed it was necessary to construct a textbook in such a way that it would accompany the entire educational process and perform not only teaching, but also developing and educating functions. From a tool for transmitting information, the textbook had to turn into a means of organizing joint activities between teachers and students, as well as the students themselves. They believed that such a textbook would help both the teacher and the students. Then the supporters of reference textbooks and training textbooks won. Such textbooks, without changing in essence, are predominantly used today. Even the indisputable, major achievements of linguists and psychodidacts of the twentieth century. Only occasionally, with great difficulty, do they make their way into the so-called new generations of textbooks.

Why did the supporters of such textbooks win in those years? There are two main reasons: firstly, the mass school urgently needed textbooks, and the creation of textbooks that would serve the entire educational process required a lot of time and specially trained personnel. Secondly, science up to the 1960s. took only the first steps in studying the psychology of mastering such a subject as the Russian language (see the works of D.N. Bogoyavlensky, L.I. Bozhovich, L.S. Slavina, A.M. Orlova and others).

Thus, there was no scientific foundation for constructing textbooks of a new type that would accompany the entire course of education.

To create a new type of textbooks in 1965 G.G. Granik managed to organize the first seminar for teachers at the Research Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR and the Russian Pedagogical Society. In total, over 30 people took part in the seminar. It existed for about 11 years. The creation of textbooks of a new type was based on numerous studies in various fields of science: general and educational psychology, psychodidactics, developmental physiology, methodology, etc. The results of research of these years are reflected in five monographic collections and in books in the “Problems of a School Textbook” series.

In 1971, the team of authors created the first experimental textbook of a new type on syntax and punctuation of the Russian language, which was awarded the prize named after. K.D. Ushinsky. In the history of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, this was the first time when the prize was received not only by the institute’s research staff, but also by experimental teachers (out of 10 authors, six were teachers: S.M. Bondarenko, O.Z. Kantarovskaya, E.D. Kin, L.A. Kontsevaya, S.S. Levitina, E.L. Solomonova).

At present, both in general and in educational psychology, a large amount of material has been accumulated on the process of acquiring knowledge, on the causes of the occurrence of certain disorders, failures in this process, on the content of new formations that occur in the development of a child under the influence of learning. Fundamental research includes the doctoral dissertation of G.G. Granik “Psychological model of the process of formation of punctuation skills” (1985).

The fact is that the textbook requires a holistic approach to the problem of its creation. Such unity is based on the synthesis of a number of sciences - general psychology, psychodidactics, modern linguistics, literary criticism, developmental physiology, logic and methodology that serves the developed holistic concept.

The problem of constructing textbooks of a new type could not be solved without creating a holistic course in Russian philology. The unification of the Russian language and literature into a single educational field “Russian Philology” involved studying the relationship between the school subjects “Russian language” and “literature”. And this, in turn, required the creation of another seminar, the participants of which, together with the group members, conducted the necessary psychological research. In 1999, an experimental platform “Development of the course “Russian Philology” - its content, means and methods of teaching” was opened under the Moscow Committee of Education and PI RAO, the director of which is G.G. Granik. Over the course of a number of years, the first and then, after massive experimental testing, the second versions of textbooks of a new type on the Russian language and literary reading were created with all the teaching aids: the program, methodological recommendations (lesson scenarios), textbook companions (27 books in total). The educational and methodological set was presented for the Russian Government Prize in the field of education (2008).

G.G. Granik published over two hundred works. The main scientific results lie in the field of research into the psychological mechanisms of literate speech, text comprehension, and the development of conceptual approaches to the construction of new types of textbooks. She created a new direction in psychological and pedagogical science - “School textbook”.

For the creation of the scientific, educational and methodological set “Russian Philology” G.G. Granik was awarded the Russian Presidential Prize in the field of education (1997); she was awarded the gold medal of the Russian Academy of Education “For achievements in science” (2007), the honorary badge “PSI silver” of the Federation of Educational Psychologists of the Russian Federation, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, PI RAO (2007).