State and author’s approaches to the functional illiteracy problem solution

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Article:

State and author's approaches to the functional illiteracy problem solution

Lopatukhina Tat'yana Aleksandrovna, Doctor in Pedagogy, ProfessorDon State Technical University

Rynkevich Anna Vladimirovna, Ph. D. in PedagogyUniversity of Technology

The article considers the essence of the phenomenon “functional illiteracy”, some reasons explaining the appearance of this phenomenon in our country and the directions of its wiping out basing on some educational measures undertaken by the state and developed scientific educational techniques. Text-centered technology of authentic contents sense processing gives the fundamental character of a specific educational subject.

Key words and phrases: functional literacy; functional illiteracy; intellectualoperations; interpretation; text-centered techniques.

The urgency of the issue of functional illiteracy is growing rapidly: illiterate children, an increasing number ofelderly people who cannot keep up with the quickly changing and evolving information environment with all itsViber, WhatsApp, Skype, etc.

Russian education has undergone a process of continual reforming for the last 20-25 years: some strategies replaceother ones, technologies of their implementation have unsystematic and inconsequent character, not yet timetested FSES (Federal State Education Standard) is replaced by the following one. The achievements of national education have been lost and the so-called educational projects are penetrated. These projects are far from education (e.g. Minerva Project, International Soros Science Education Program - ISIEP).

Today much attention is being paid to the phenomenon which is termed “functional illiteracy”. But before discussing the problem of functional illiteracy let state what is literacy in general. Literacy is defined as the ability tounderstand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in a society, achieve one's goals, and develop one's knowledge and potential[4]. Literacy and basic knowledge cannot be separated from each other. The notion “literacy” is a part of basic knowledge. It is a precondition as well as an outcome of basic knowledge.

Along with the traditionally accepted notionof “literacy”, the term "functional literacy" was actively used. Functional literacy is the ability of a person to enter into a relationship with the external environment, quickly adapt andfunction in it; it is a human ability to obtain and enlarge knowledge and skills through multidimensional activity (lifelong learning, professional and daily activities). It is obvious that one of the features of functional literacy is the ability to cope with life problems in different spheres of activities because ofapplied knowledge needed in a rapidly changing society. Functional literacy acts as a way of social orientation of a person.

The hallmarks of functional literacy are: (a) focus on solving everyday problems; (b) situational characteristics of the individual (in specific social circumstances); (с) communication with the solution of standard tasks; (d) basic skills in reading and writing; (e) assessment of the adult population[1].

Certainly, functional literacy is a precondition for the successful young people adaptation to the environment. Inmodern terms it is a guarantee of human survival and the attribute of lifelong learning.

Functional literacy is in opposition with functional illiteracy. Today, alas, we have lost the main ability - tocommunicate with the outside world. Here we deal with the phenomenon like "functional illiteracy". This should not be confused with the problem of illiteracy - the inability to read and write. There are no agreed-upon definitions of what functional illiteracy is and, in practice, definitions vary widely. We can suggest some of them. One definition of functional illiteracy holds that anyone is “illiterate” who reads at less than an eight-grade level. It is the inability to read or write well enough to accomplish everydaytasks in modern society.Functional literacy is the level ofknowledge and skills which ensure the normal human functioning in the system ofsocial relations. According toUNESCO functional illiteracy is defined as follows: “A person isfunctionally illiteratewho cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing, and calculation for his own and the community's development” [4]. Inother words, illiterate person cannot both read and write with understanding a short simple statement on his everyday life. It appears, for instance, in the ability to understand federal income-tax forms, opening bank accounts, reading ingredients of food products, understanding medication or technical instructions, signing contracts, writing aletter of complaint or filling out a job application.

People began to think about the issue of functional illiteracy in the 80-s of the last century. The problem was that people coped with their professional responsibilities worse in spite of their literacy and education: they knew how to read and write but they did not understand the meaning of the delivered text, they could not write a logically coherent text.

Why is functional illiteracy regarded as a phenomenon that represents a danger to society? What are the main reasons of this process development? Negligence, carelessness, irresponsibility, accidents... We can go on to enumeratethis list. It's not a chance, a fatal bad luck. All of them are the direct results of functional illiteracy. In modern environment people who can't understand the instructions, interpret warnings incorrectly, do not pay attention to important details are a real source of danger.

The functional illiteracy problem solution led us to the question of education system scientific fundamental education was the characteristic of former Soviet educational system organization in our country. As this system is being constantly reformed, we actually do not see any way out of this situation in the nearest future. We may confirm our point of view with the following facts: 1) instability presence of state educational strategies; 2) the loss of taught subjects contents common to all learners prepared for one and the same specialty in different types of educational institutions; 3) the neglect of the education quality as its main goal; 4) the neglect of the state demands and needsconcerning the number of graduates in different specialties; and as a consequence, appearing great difficulties ingraduates employment; 5) regarding education as a commercial service; 6) in excessive role of educational managers cultivating formalized approaches in education, considering different kinds of indices an figures to be the main results of education.

The enumeration of the reasons sequence seems to be endless but still we should state that now the situation isgradually positively changing. We see two directions in bettering this situation: 1) some measures undertaken by the state and 2) some measures connected with implementing the author's educational projects. New Minister ofEducation and Science of RF tries to solve some problems connected with the teachers role in our society byraising their status: changing the existing system of teachers training; restoring moral standards and moral laws in our education and, in the long run, restoring the whole upbringing system as a phenomenon essential toour education; creating heuristic innovative models in conjunction with Russian national educational traditions based on the Russian culture.

Radical changes should touch upon teacher's role in an educational process: a teacher should act as a steersman for a pupil via the boundless fields of electronic information; a teacher should be able to organize «face-to-face» education with a pupil because they both should cooperate in learning process to reach good results in the personality development of a pupil.

These were the first efforts undertaken by our state to advance Russian education.

Russian pedagogical community should actively take part in realizing new approaches into our educational practice through author's educational projects, concepts and ideas. One of them was worked out by us. It concerned thephenomenon of text information interpretation by applying text-centered technology. This technology is designed for high-school professional education. The essence of the proposed technology looks like this.

Using authentic scientific professional text while teaching language as a source of professional contents.

Implementing this authentic scientific professional contents into an educational process after text interpretation and producing a training text for an educational process that would develop students skills, habits and competences.

Working out definite steps in the process of interpretation for obtaining a training text that would preserve all main categorical characteristics of an authentic text: typical tense-aspect forms; logical, lexical, associative and grammatical cohesion means; typical text organizes, stereotyped patterns realizing text functional perspective; text coherence and text continuum and the like.

Developing notional thinking and intellectual operations through a worked out system of interpretation.

Acquainting the learners with various creative products of text interpretation such as an abstract, a scientific article, a specialized paper and an account, an essay or a composition, etc.

This is the second variant of the proposed way of bettering the quality of our education. And now we pass on to the description of the third variant of our education bettering way.

Watching the decay of upbringing system in our country we have elaborated our own approach to youth upbringing basing on spiritual and moral principles. We'll dwell on two things: the essence and technology of its realization [2].The approach can be termed as “The priority-oriented approach to youth upbringing” [3]. Our approach is understood as a system of professional upbringing including the interaction of two subjects of upbringing process within the framework of spiritual and moral upbringing of students against the background of upbringing local medium (space). The main thing concerning this approach underlies in a peculiar way of treatment of such phenomenon aspriority, to be more accurate, the priority of moral choice. It is moral choice in solving everyday problems that can be taken as an indicator of a personality features and qualities.

Our approach includes some obligatory components, the set of the latter being described below:

1) the hierarchy of upbringing medium; upbringing space and priority-oriented upbringing space;

2) integrated algorithmic realization program, encompassing idea-action/idea-deed (thepoint of view propounded by M. M. Bakhtin, the great Russian specialist in study of literature); personality features and qualities, qualification standards requirements, professional competences, priority choice with using two matrices ? a) priorities matrix and b) dilemmas set matrix ? and professional competency;

3) lexical field of this approach showing its main notions, terms and definitions used for its description;

4) project technology, containing aseries oflectures on the theory of spiritual and moral upbringing, some didactic materials for monitoring students level ofknowledge and competences possession;

5) prognostic training complex for students developing and selfperfecting in choosing spiritual and moral priorities in the framework of their professional activities.

We have combined our approach with the ideas of a comparatively new scienceknown as pedagogy logistics inwhich we see a promising way of putting into practice the youth upbringing process.

Pedagogy logistics is understood as subclass of logistics dealing with pedagogic fluxes management [3]. Pedagogy logistics uses two main principles in its organization:

1) the punctuality of performing meeting the deadline requirements;

2) the simplicity of different systems functioning.

Pedagogy logistics has united and synchronized itsfollowing several fluxes into a rigid controlled pedagogic system: the mobile flux, the flux of knowledge and intellect; the flux of general training and intellect developing; psychological flux; the flux of neuropedagogy; the flux of health; the flux of information; the flux of equipment used and the flux of logistics implementation technology. Even simple enumeration of pedagogy logistics fluxes confirms the fact that all efforts and achievements in pedagogy as a science are being contributed into one of the pedagogy parts, namely: didactics (training), again, the part of pedagogy dealing with upbringing being neglected.

So, to substitute a deficiency in this respect we suggest that two more fluxes dealing with the problem of youth upbringing should be added into the list of fluxes of pedagogy logistics such as

1) spiritual and moral upbringing flux and

2) career-oriented prognostic flux.

The role of these two fluxes lies in helping and distinguishing spiritual and moral qualities that being combined with and applied to career professional qualities will represent the wanted qualities of modern specialists. And, finally, having the necessary qualities suitable for all professions a young specialist will make his choice of personality qualities and directions of self-perfecting basing on technology of our priority-oriented approach.

Let's turn our attention to describing spiritual and moral upbringing flux. Spiritual and moral upbringing flux represents the set of qualities outcoming from cultural values of a nation developed throughout the whole history ofits ethnographic evolution. We have already mentioned them in this paper, namely: mercy, charity, compassion, support, mutual assistance, firmness, stableness, tolerance, kindness, decency, honesty, loyalty, justice, social justice, faithfulness, acquiring national cultural values, responsibility, creativity and others.

The distinguished moral values, in our opinion, should be distributed among five upbringing process types:

1) family upbringing;

2) upbringing accompanying education;

3) upbringing in the course communication with young people of the same age;

4) personality self-raising;

5) professional self-raising. Such approach, to our mind, turns out to be optimal asthe rigid system of upbringing may be formed with its help.

Thus, we may conclude that only common efforts of the state and pedagogical community may turn out to be effective in changing the whole educational situation in our country.

References

functional illiteracy pedagogical community

1. Веряев А. А., Нечунаева М. Н., Татарникова Г. В.Функциональная грамотность учащихся: представления, критический анализ, измерение //Известия Алтайского государственного университета. 2013. Выпуск № 2 (78). Том 2.С. 13-17.

2. Лопатухина Т.А., Рынкевич А.В. Языковая коммуникация и ее контент в иноязычном образовательном пространстве высшей школы // Известия Волгоградского государственного педагогического университета. Педагогические науки. 2016. № 3 (107).С. 78-84.

3. Lopatukhina T. A., Osipova A. V.An Innovative Spiritual and Moral Approach to Young People Upbringing Based on PedagogyLogistics // Вестник Донского государственного технического университета. 2013. № 3-4 (72-73). C. 165-171. 4.OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills [Электронныйресурс]. URL: http://www.oecd.

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