Features of stylistic diversity of speech as a sign of professional burnout of a teacher

Shipilova K.V.

Graduate student
State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education Moscow State Pedagogical Univ., Institute of Foreign Languages
E-mail: Krista_94@mail.ru

A teacher's speech style creates a specific emotional context for interactions with students. The emotional atmosphere that develops during pedagogical communication between teacher and students colors the semantics of the acquired knowledge and fosters "bias" [A.N. Leontiev, 1977] in the developing professional consciousness.

Functionally, a teacher's pedagogical speech style determines students' acquisition of academic knowledge and also influences the psychological context of students' linguistic consciousness, stimulating or, conversely, hindering its development. An emotionally stable teacher, capable of adequately adjusting their emotional state to emerging communicative learning situations, creates a positive psychological context for pedagogical communication. Emotionally unstable teachers, showing signs of professional burnout, create a negative psychological context during communication. Therefore, studying the characteristics of stylistic diversity in speech as a sign of teacher burnout is a pressing psycholinguistic challenge.

A teacher's speech is a crucial tool in their professional work. The functional characteristics of professional language, i.e., its use depending on the nature of the professional activity, collectively create the stylistic characteristics of professional speech [Myskin, 2014]. If we consider a teacher's speech from a functional-stylistic perspective, we can hypothetically assert that it encompasses all styles of speech in various communicative educational situations. After all, a teacher's verbal communication takes into account a specific functional style of speech: scientific, formal-business, journalistic, artistic, or colloquial. The communicative educational situation largely determines the style of professional speech.

In professional communication with students, teachers consider the student's objective and subjective characteristics—age, psychological makeup, interests—which undoubtedly determines the specific phonetic, grammatical, and stylistic design of speech messages. This creates the socio-psychological conditions for stylistic diversity in the teacher's pedagogical speech. After all, the psychological context of the content of pedagogical communication is dynamic due to the situational nature of its evaluative component [Myskin, Lychagina, 2018]. Therefore, it is difficult to say that a teacher uses, for example, only a scientific or artistic style of speech in the classroom. It is more accurate to assert that the stylistic diversity of a teacher's professional speech is an effective means of shaping students' linguistic awareness.

Below we present a brief analysis of the state of the art of functional speech styles. Each style, according to M.N. Kozhina, possesses a speech system: the linguistic means included in a given functional language variety are interconnected based on their "fulfillment of a common function" [Kozhina, 2003, p. 347]. Applied to our study, the following model of stylistic diversity in teacher speech can be formulated. The alternation of educational communicative situations in accordance with the knowledge content determines a change in the style of the teacher's professional speech. For example, when telling a linguistic fairy tale, the teacher uses elements of artistic style, while his presentation during class hour is presented in the style of a journalistic text. The explanation of a theorem is presented in a scientific style. At the same time, in informal conversation with students, the teacher uses a conversational style.

It should be noted that the individual characteristics of a teacher's stylistic diversity are determined by their personal characteristics and qualities. Stylistic diversity is also influenced by the context of pedagogical activity, namely: the set of tasks, means, and methods of pedagogical activity and communication, as well as the work rhythm, characteristic and stable for a given teacher [Luzina, 2003].

An individual speech style is an indicator of a high level of pedagogical skill and a high level of proficiency in professional speech, as the choice of speech tools that reveals an individual professional approach presupposes the teacher's familiarity with the full range of these tools and an understanding of their own rhetorical nature. A teacher chooses an individual style because it brings the greatest satisfaction in their work. V.A. Kan-Kalik notes that the level of pedagogical skill depends on the teacher's mastery of techniques and methods on an individual and creative level [Kan-Kalik, 1997].

O.S. Akhmanova gives the following interpretation of the concept of individual style: «Individual style is a set of stylistic elements that are invariably present in the works of a given author in a certain period of his creativity and extend to all his work as a whole, the originality of the methods of word usage, constructions, characterizing the oral and/or written speech of an individual, regardless of his attitude to writing» [Akhmanova, 2007, p. 455].

Each speech style manifests itself in specific speech clichés. When applied to pedagogical speech, the most functional styles are scientific, artistic, and colloquial. Below are examples of stylistic speech clichés used by teachers, recorded in the protocols of educational communicative situations (Table 1).

 

Table 1

Examples of stylistic speech clichés of teachers

Speech style	Teacher's speech messages
Scientific style	«"the conclusion follows from this"; "reduce to a common denominator"; "consists of..."; "represents..."; "consists of..."; "question"; "task"; "process"; "right angle"; "inclined plane"; "voiceless consonants"; "adverbial participial phrase"; "compound sentence"»
Artistic style	«"His conscience gnawed at him, long and insidiously"; "He was in a terrible mood, and his soul was clawed by cats"; "It's time for youths to start absorbing the streams of wisdom"; "It's not appropriate to compete with stupidity"; "Hungry as a wolf"; "Impregnable as a wall"»
Conversational style	«"I've asked and asked, but it's all in vain!"; "Well, go ahead"; "Well done, Mishka! Well done!"; "I just want to bring you up to speed"; "How are you? Fine"; "skinny"; "tall"; "talkative"; "curvy"; "running around"; "lazy"; "chatterbox"»

Scientific style has its own lexical, grammatical means, and features of the syntactic structure of the sentence. The main characteristic of the scientific style is "clarity." Other advantages of scientific language are ease, brevity, freedom of transitions from sentence to sentence, and simplicity. The teacher must be competent in both oral and written implementation of the scientific style of speech. After all, mastery of the scientific style of speech is directly related to the development of a scientific type of thinking. I.A. Bogomolova wrote that the complex content of the scientific style of speech consists of the formation and development of speech skills and abilities required for communication in the educational and scientific sphere of students; mastery of the necessary linguistic means; assimilation of a certain minimum of basic information of a substantive nature [Bogomolova, 2005]. D.S. Likhachev argues that the requirements for the language of scientific work differ sharply from the requirements for the language of fiction. Metaphors and various images in the language of scientific work are permissible only in cases where it is necessary to place a logical emphasis on some idea. In scientific work, imagery is only a pedagogical technique for attracting the reader’s attention to the main idea of the work [Likhachev, 1991].

The following stylistic features (signs) of scientific speech can be distinguished: objectivity (presentation of different points of view on the problem, absence of subjectivity in conveying scientific content, impersonality of linguistic expression); logic (consistency and consistency of presentation); evidence (argumentation of certain positions and hypotheses); accuracy (use of terms, unambiguous words, clear design of syntactic links in a sentence and text); brevity and information saturation (use of types of compression of scientific text); generality and abstractness of judgments (use of general scientific vocabulary, nouns with abstract meaning), impersonality and abstractness of the statement (use of special grammatical forms: predominance of reflexive and impersonal verbs, use of the 3rd person verb, indefinite-personal sentences, passive constructions); standardization of means of expression (the use of speech clichés of scientific style to design the structure and components of scientific work, as well as the genres of annotations, abstracts, reviews, etc.).

Artistic style differs from other styles of the Russian language by its special aesthetic function. The main characteristic of artistic style is stylistic openness, since literary works use words of the literary language, dialectal words, and slang; both colloquial and scientific speech are stylized, for example, in the dialogues of the characters. The second characteristic of artistic style is artistically figurative speech concretization, the systematization of linguistic means based on their performance of a special task: the creation of an artistic image (a concrete, sensory picture of reality that evokes aesthetic experiences). Scientific prose affects the mind, while fiction affects the feelings. According to M.N. Kozhina, the most general stylistic feature of artistic speech is artistically figurative speech concretization [Kozhina, 1993]. However, cliches are completely unacceptable in the language of fiction - mechanically applied "current" epithets, frequently used comparisons that are incapable of evoking any emotions, and formulaic expressions. Which is characteristic of the scientific style.

Based on the above, the following characteristics of artistic style can be identified: linguistic means convey the artistic image, emotional state, and mood of the teacher; the use of stylistic figures—metaphors, similes, metonymies, etc., emotionally expressive vocabulary, and phraseological units; the use of polysemy—words are chosen so that they not only "paint" images but also convey hidden meaning; the function of conveying information is often hidden. The goal of artistic style is to convey the author's emotions and create a mood and emotional state in the reader.

Conversational style Speech has its own phonetic, lexical and grammatical features. A characteristic feature of colloquial speech is its lexical heterogeneity. This is explained by the thematic diversity of colloquial speech. E.G. Skibitsky wrote that the colloquial style includes: literary-colloquial style. It uses generally accepted words that correspond to the norms of the literary language; colloquial-vernacular style. It is characterized by words and phrases that deviate from the literary norm, have a hint of stylistic degradation; vulgar-colloquial. This is a social variety of speech, distinguished by the use of expressively colored words and expressions [Skibitsky, 2018]. Shiryaev E.N. identified the main features of the colloquial style: colloquial speech is spontaneous, unprepared; colloquial speech is used in an informal setting; during colloquial speech, speakers directly (subjectively) participate in communication [Shiryaev, 1982].

The linguistic features of colloquial speech include: the use of extralexical means: intonation - phrasal and emphatic (emotionally expressive) stress, pauses, speech tempo, rhythm, etc.; the widespread use of everyday vocabulary and phraseology, emotionally expressive vocabulary (including particles, interjections), different classes of introductory words; the uniqueness of syntax: elliptical and incomplete sentences of various types, address words, sentence words, repetitions of words, sentence breaks with inserted constructions, weakening and disruption of the forms of syntactic connection between parts of the utterance, connecting constructions, etc.

Thus, stylistic diversity in a teacher's professional speech lies in the appropriate use of functional speech styles in the current educational communicative situation. A teacher's normal psycho-emotional state creates the internal conditions for stylistic transitions during pedagogical communication with students. Emotionally burned-out teachers, whose internal state is characterized by instability and requires increased self-control, find stylistic transitions difficult. This effect occurs due to the teacher's inflexibility and lack of dynamism in their emotional sphere. Under these circumstances, the specialist cannot use a particular functional style appropriately in the emerging educational communicative situation.

Thus, the following conclusions can be drawn. In professional communication, teachers demonstrate stylistic diversity, which is an important prerequisite for the effectiveness of their speech. Within the psychological norm, teachers use different speech styles in their speech, corresponding to the relevance of the educational communicative situation. This allows for speech adaptation to the target audience, i.e., the students.

Teachers prone to emotional burnout demonstrate a lack of adaptability in their speech styles. The psycho-emotional state of such teachers is characterized by heightened self-control and a blocking of stylistic transitions, which manifests itself in their professional speech. The teacher focuses on only one speech style, which becomes dominant in all educational communicative situations.

Literature:

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References:

1. Ahmanova OS. Dictionary of linguistic terms. Moscow: KomKniga, 2007. 576 pp.
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