Anasheva D.K., Tuganbekova A.К.

Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan

THE USAGE OF CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TEXT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING CLASSES

Critical analysis of the text is an effective tool for the development of students’ critical thinking, making their speech coherent; it can take one of the crucial places in the whole system of the foreign language teaching.

Any fragment of the text is a relationship between language and experience. “Language does not just provide words for already existing concepts; it crystallizes and stabilizes ideas” [1]. Firstly, we guess the habitual meaning of a language and then analyze how texts unsettle the familiar creativity. During this process we not only draw attention on the new knowledge of the text, but we scrutinize the structure of the text observing the reasons of the English learning intensification occurrence as well.

However, the technique used in the text is not so widely applicable by virtue of the fact that the majority of people deem that a student needs a sufficiently high level of English for preparing critical analysis.

This article suggests steps for critical analysis of the text for students with different levels of the English language that allow them to improve speaking and writing skills and critical thinking as well. The analysis consists of several steps, where students should answer three main questions about the text:

1) What is it about?

2) How is it written?

3) Why is it written?

At the beginning of the lesson a teacher can take into account all these questions in order to explicate how they can make an analysis of the text according to the questions above.

Steps of the analysis:

1) What is the text about?

Before looking at the structures, the meanings of the sentences and propositions, there is much to say about dynamics of the text as interpersonal communication in the context. According to the Roger Fowler, “there are at least three useful meanings: context of utterance, context of culture, and context of reference” [2]. The context of an utterance comprises several points: who is writing, who is presented as an observer, whether it is a narrator or a participating character, it compromises to whom it may concern, where the actions take place. The context of culture is the condition for understanding the text. Through it students can perceive the historical, cultural and social information that serve as background. The last one is the context of reference that reveals the subject as a matter of the text, what it is about. Answering this question in form of discussion with group mates and a teacher, students prepare their drafts for analysis. Further they will try to sum up it in their own critical analysis of the text.

We analyzed the novel The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster like an example for context analysis. Reading this fiction, students can observe this special literary relationship between protagonist and his nephew, that leads to the amazing conversations. For example: “No one ever talks about Poe and Thoreau in the same breath. They stand at opposite ends of American thought. But that’s the beauty of it” (BF, p11). Indeed no one considers them as the like-minded people. And by words of character, Paul Auster states his personal view about these two great writers: “Poe was artifice and the gloom of midnight chambers. Thoreau was simplicity and the radiance of the outdoor s. In spite of their differences, they were born just eight years apart, which made them almost exact contemporaries. And they both died young-at forty and forty-five. Together, they barely managed to live the life of a single old man, and neither one left behind any children. In all probability, Thoreau went to his grave a virgin. Poe married his teenage cousin, but whether that marriage was consummated before Virginia Clemm’s death is still open to question. Call them parallels, call them coincidences, but these external facts are less important than the inner truth of each man’s life” (BF, p11).

In this fragment students can perceive the huge interest of the author on Thoreau and Poe. It is quite crucial to depict students how to conduct the parallels, and scrutinize the context. Because of the principal motivation for practicing critical analysis of the text as a healthy curiosity, students become interested in conditions of, and restriction on their society and in the implications of meanings come

about. This process will go easily, they will conduct own research and deepen their English language knowledge.

2) How is it written?

As R. Fowler mentioned in her book Linguistic Criticism “A proposition is an abstract unit of meaning, and so there is a process of ‘realization’ or ‘expression’ between the abstract idea and the concrete speech or written text”[1]. So, one of the expression aspects is syntax, which provides tools for the message dimension, the other unit of expression is the choice of vocabulary, which shapes the ideas handled by propositions.

Before starting the critical analysis of the text, an analysis of lexical and phrase logical means of language should be carried out in the form of conversation. It helps establish what the relationship between the content and the form of the language is. A teacher makes students' responses be available to the author's text with the usage of possible lexical and phraseological resources. A teacher also pays attention to the convergence of stylistic expressive means such as simile, metaphor, idiom, etc. This activity provides the enrichment of students’ writing with different syntactical constructions, which contributes to the expanding of student writing skills.

As an example, we decided to take the fragment from Joan Didion’s creative non-fiction “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, since it is a bright example of language familiarization. “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled”. This sentence is very strong and evaluative; the repetition of adjective misplaced with its disapprobative tone and the repetition of conjunction and only amplifies the affect. Here the author also used ironic phrase causal killings, it sounds weird, and a combination of the words seems incompatible, therefore it attracts readers attention , but even as the specific use of lexis can convey the message of the author. It proves that the choice of vocabulary shapes the ideas handled by propositions. Thus through the semantic foregrounding we can perceive the apocalyptic meaning of the fragment.

3) Why is it written?

This part is the most crucial, because it unites the first and the second steps. Students should present their understanding of the text message and reveal the question: why it was written? After completing first two steps with a teacher in a discussion, later it will be easier for students to propose their own critical analysis of the text, summarizing what they debated about with group mates and a teacher.

Overall, taking into consideration these steps of the text critical analysis can enlarge the advancement of students’ knowledge of English. The use of the critical analysis of the text in the English learning classes implicates the development of all aspects of English learning, gives the opportunity for students to express their own attitude in English which provides to improve all the main activities as Speaking, Reading, Listening and Writing.

List of literature:

1. Roger Fowler. Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. p. 112 “Text and context”.             

2. Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

3. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem