Systemic description of the student’s language consciousness: student’s self-image

Abstract

The paper discusses the results of a series of experiments aimed at studying how the self-image of the undergraduate student changes from the first to the fourth year. The language consciousness is interpreted as a concept that fixes a certain regular relationship between internal (personal) and external (socio-cultural) factors which can drive changes in the meanings and personal senses of words. Such a semantic shift suggests regular changes in the images that lie behind these words in the consciousness of the studied group of people. The hypothesis about their reason was as follows: during the years of study the student’s self-image undergoes significant changes due to various activities related to the academic environment as well as to personal evaluation of his/her own activities. This hypothesis was tested by a series of experiments based on the methods of free associations and spontaneous completing of unfinished sentences. The idea behind the simultaneous use of two methods is to increase the degree of their reliability, to see whether the results complement or contradict each other. The hypothesis was partially confirmed. During the years of university studies, the student’s self-image in the student’s language consciousness was enriched with a variety of language means, primarily expressive ones. However, the growing variety of linguistic means of expressing the self-image of the student does not allow us to speak about a significant qualitative change of this image because no new features, nor new aspects of the image appear. We may conclude that only a quantitative change was observed. The variety of linguistic means of expression should not be interpreted as a sign of low integrity of this image, despite their semantic inconsistency. The student only seems to live in two worlds or have two lives: he/she gains new knowledge, but at the same time suffers because it’s not easy; students try to improve their selves, but do not understand why they need or have to do so; they skip classes, but manage to pass the exams successfully. The contradictory character of verbal means used to express a typical student’s image in their language consciousness discovers the ambivalence of the student’s personal attitude to him/herself as well as to the wide range of his/her activities. Ambivalence which seems even paradoxical.

Keywords: student, student’s self-image, language consciousness, personal sense.