Counter Text as a Tool for Studying Understanding

The purpose of the research is to investigate the phenomenon of counter text from the point of view of psycholinguistic mechanisms of activity that “launches” its creation – the individual’s metalinguistic activity. The creation of a counter text (“finished product” of understanding) is considered in a complex of “events” during perception and understanding of the text as a separate stage of understanding activity.

Materials and methods. To analyze counter texts, the author used an experimental technique. The materials of the study appeared to be 55 counter texts obtained during the experiment conducted among 1st and 2nd year students of the Southwestern State University (52 participants) and teachers of the Department of Foreign Languages of the Southwestern State University (3 participants), a total of 55 people.

The results of the experiment indicate that the construction of a counter text has a deeply individual character, due to the difference in the strategies of metalinguistic activity of the participants of the experiment presented in the article, and the difference in the qualitative characteristics and properties of metalinguistic activity recorded during the analysis of counter texts. The characteristic features of metalinguistic activity are noted: paraphrasing and replacing words with synonyms or those that play the role of synonyms in the individual lexicon of the subjects; adding evaluative judgments and intermediate conclusions to the narrative canvas of counter texts; introducing abbreviated semantic blocks that are understandable to the author of the counter text, but require additional decoding; generalization of information; restructuring the original structure of the author's text; distortion of individual details of the content.

Conclusion. The counter text is a compressed fragment of the "reality" recreated by the recipient, which arose in his consciousness as a result of the influence of the author's text. The degree of discrepancy is determined, firstly, by the presence or absence of such experience in the recipient (both his own lived experience and adapted through books, etc.), and secondly, by the formation of cognitive mechanisms for processing information that make it possible to refract someone else's segment of reality and project it onto one's own reality; thirdly, the presence of a sufficient arsenal of linguistic means and skills for their immediate use. The counter text is an accessible tool for studying the individual's metalinguistic activity.

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