ISSN 0798 1015

Vol. 40 (Number 17) Year 2019. Page 20

The individual style of speech of teachers from higher education institutions as an indicator of pedagogical professionalism

Estilo individual del discurso del profesor universitario como modelo de la maestría pedagógica

VOLKOVA, Natalia P. 1; TARNOPOLSKY, Oleg B. 2 & OLYINIK, Irina V. 3

Received: 20/02/2019 • Approved: 28/04/2019 • Published 27/05/2019

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Styles of speech as a pedagogical problem

3. Methodology of the study

4. Results and their discussion

5. Conclusions

Bibliographic references

1. Introduction

In today’s Ukraine all the conditions for developing creative initiatives of people have been created which opens for them broad opportunities for expressing their various ideas, beliefs, evaluations, for implementing the aspirations of every person to achieve personal individualization. This is especially important in teaching activities, which, having no rigid outside regulations, ensure the emergence of very good possibilities for manifestations of the teachers’ individual style in various teaching and learning situations, for expressions of their individual visions of the subject they teach, their own emotional attitude to that subject, to their students, to the selection of certain ways and means of communication that are also embodied in the teacher’s oral and written speech.

The social and economic transformations which are taking place in Ukraine, the transition of its economy to the new technological level require aiming all the areas of social functioning at innovative development. They also require modernization of higher professional education system. The social expectations from multi-level higher education demand the introduction of better elaborated indices concerning the education quality as a consequence of organizing it on the basis of competence approach, the individualization of education routes, and the diversification of education strategies. The improvement of pedagogical professionalism, qualifications, and skills of future university teachers is the priority direction in the innovative development and modernization of higher professional education system, especially when it concerns the postgraduate (doctoral, PhD) training of such teachers.

In view of this, in the context of enhancing the professional qualifications of postgraduate (PhD) pedagogy students, an important aspect is developing their individual style of speech. This style is manifested in postgraduate students’ skills of structuring their oral and written discourse logically, especially when that discourse is related to the topic of their research; it is also manifested in their ability to substantiate their own points of view and ideas; in the skills of public speaking, as well as in the ability to organize effective interaction with others.

It should be remarked that the issues and problems of individualization of teaching and learning, of developing the individualized styles of such teaching and learning, including not only the pedagogical but also the psychological aspects of that individualization, have already been discussed in a number of publications. For instance, in publications on our own research results those aspects were thoroughly analyzed (especially in connection with the introduction of some innovative methods of teaching and learning) in several of our published books (Volkova, Tarnopolsky, 2013; Volkova, 2018; Tarnopolsky, Kabanova, 2019).

However, despite the considerable interest of researchers in the issues and problems of pedagogical communication, the individual styles of teachers’ speech as an important component of such communication have remained understudied, especially in what concerns the development of those styles in students of pedagogical higher education institutions.

Therefore, the goal of this article is the theoretical substantiation of peculiarities of individual teacher’s speech style, the practical study of today’s situation with the development of that style by postgraduate students of Pedagogy (future university teachers), and drawing conclusions concerning further stages of research directly aimed at creating the best means and conditions for developing such a style when training future university teachers. In accordance with this goal, the particular tasks of our study are: to analyze the notions of teacher’s “language,” “speech,” and “style”, to discuss the peculiarities of different styles of speech, to find on what levels of development of such individual styles postgraduate students are, and to make conclusions required for the next stage of research.

2. Styles of speech as a pedagogical problem

For considering the issue of teacher’s individual style of speech, it is expedient to define first the notions on which this phenomenon is based: the notions of “language,” “speech,” and “style.”

The language is a single, integral, and complicated system of signs consisting of phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and sentences that serve not only as a means of communication, of exchanging ideas and their reinforcement but also as a means of formation of those ideas because thinking has a language basis and any normative language always has thoughts underlying it (Babich, 1990). Language is a principal communication tool and the principal means of mutual understanding in human society, the entirety of oral and written signs denoting objects/phenomena of reality as they are reflected in human consciousness, as well as commonly accepted rules of combining those signs when expressing ideas – both the signs and rules of their combination being recognized as normative within a given society, or a speech community (Hymes, 1974; Murashov, 2002). As a specifically human means of communication language lives only in speech without which it is dead. The latter may be defined as the language functioning in the process of expressing and exchanging ideas – speech constituting a specific form of language existence which makes it a special type of social activities (Goncharenko, 1997).

The efficiency of teacher’s speech depends on how well this speech matches the style required in a given communicative situation and on how well it matches students’ expectations. The efficiency also depends on how the style is embodied, i.e. on how the individual style of a speaker/writer is manifested.

In what concerns the style, this scientific notion was introduced by Adler, the Austrian psychologist of the first half of the 20th century, who believed that every human being has an opportunity of freely creating his or her personality and lifestyle from the “raw material” of heredity and experience of interaction with the environment. According to Adler (Adler, 1995), every individual is a unity of personality and individual formation of that personality, an artist creating such a personality. With his theory Adler has determined the methodology of studying styles in Western psychology, those studies having as their basis the following postulates: 1) the style is a manifestation of personal integrity; 2) the style is connected with a certain direction of personality and the system of personal values; 3) the style plays a compensatory role helping the individuality to adapt in the best possible manner to the requirements of the environment.

Considering integral individuality as a great self-regulating system, Merlin (Merlin, 1986) shows that the individual style plays the role of an intermediate link in all the connections on different levels of that integral individuality. Acquiring an individual style overcomes the discord between some individual properties on different levels, thereby making the entire system more harmonious (Merlin, 1996). This central position occupied by the style is due to the fact that, as a personal formation of late development, it is based on already developed individual and personal properties, uniting them into one single whole. The style plays a compensatory function helping a person to find support in his or her strong points in the process of performing activities. Every person tries to organize his or her activities in such a way as to make their performance convenient for himself/herself. Sometimes those conditions are realized, i.e. perceived quite consciously, but more often a person is aware of them on the subconscious level only. The result of choosing the style correctly in accordance with the person’s individual peculiarities is the feeling of comfort and convenience that this person has and disappearance of tension when performing his/her activities.

Perebyinis (Perebyinis, 1972) defines the styles of language as the multitude of language units united by a common emotionally expressive or stylistically functional meaning. For distinguishing the individual aspect in stylistic organization of discourse the word combination “individual style of speech” is used. It either signifies the entire body of stylistic elements always present in the works of a given author in a certain period of his or her creative activities or it means the peculiarities of word usage and usage of structures that characterize oral or written speech of a certain person regardless of whether he or she is a writer or not. The peculiarities of speech patterns are the result of individual selection of language means. Those peculiarities characterize the individual manner of performing speech acts. The key words: peculiarity, individual selection, and individual manner are used for explaining the notion of the “individual style of speech” (Murashov, 2002).

The specific feature of researching the individual style of speech is that it cannot be considered outside the subject field of functional stylistics and, at the same time, cannot be limited to it. Functional stylistics demonstrates the specifics of using lexical, morphological, syntactical and other means in every kind of style. But no less important is the stylistics of language units that studies the resources on all language levels (pronunciation, vocabulary, phraseology, morphology, grammar and syntax), systemic relations of expressively colored language means as opposed to neutral ones. A great role is also played by practical stylistics that studies the usage of expressive capacity of language units.

The culture of speech is evaluated from the position of the functional style of that speech (its vocabulary, syntactic organization, the range of expressivity, etc.). In cases of style dissonance, the level of speech culture goes sharply down, that is why blending even functionally close styles is unacceptable – every style, such as the colloquial, scientific, business ones, the newspaper style, or the style of fiction (Murashov, 2002), has its own peculiarities of the culture of speech. Besides, it is necessary to take into consideration the means of implementing the oral or written form of this or that style since all modern literary languages have both – the oral one and the written one.

The discussion of some particular characteristics of the colloquial, business, and scientific styles of speech may be useful for confirming everything said above.

The colloquial style is the most traditional style of communication. It presupposes close acquaintance and a common social status of communicators; there is no necessity for the elements of formality in the language being used. Just this style is at the root of transformations and changes that happen in the language. It can be claimed that all the changes that are later manifested in monologic speaking and writing first happen in dialogic colloquial speech. In it gestures, facial expressions, intonations, etc. help mutual understanding so much that words proper stop playing the leading part in this process. That is why the colloquial style is rich in specific word-formation elements, slang, the ellipsis allowing not to say things that are clear to interlocutors from their personal experience and the context of the situation, simple language structures that presuppose situational, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic (mimics, gestures, intonation, rate and melody of speaking) means, allow for inaccuracies and imprecisions that are compensated for by the situation and the interlocutors’ experience. The style requires expressivity and dynamics, abounds in phatic formulas that help establish contact but are senseless outside the context of a given discourse.

The business style unites the language and speech elements that are characteristic of business papers and are distinguished by minimal communicative potential and deprived of expressive potential (Murashov, 2002). This style demonstrates a high degree of communicator’s responsibility for the contents of information, as well as precision and briefness of speech, accuracy of contents, impersonality of utterances, and the stereotypic nature of language and speech. The style is a collection of language clichés, office and professional language means that deprive the language of its simplicity, emotionality, and reduce the emotional impact of oral speech.

The scientific style serves for informing other people, who are interested in and prepared for it, about new knowledge. It is characterized by using specific scientific terms; the abundance of information rendered; precision, domination of reflections and monologic structures; complicated grammatical structures with numerous parentheses, which make understanding more difficult and not infrequently are in conflict with the logic of speech; using passive voice and hedging to avoid the personal responsibility of the speaker or writer; the peculiarities of syntax characterized by enumerations and framed structures complicating the comprehension of the text, etc. Dialogic openness and expressivity are not the inherent features of the scientific style whose typical manifestation is a traditional lecture-monologue practically excluding interaction. It is at the basis of the so called “professor’s syndrome” leaving the roles of only passive listeners to the audience. Regretfully, just this style is broadly spread among university teachers.

Consequently, the crucial question now is the choice of style for such a teacher. It should be taken into account that in pedagogical speech all genres (Swales, 1990) are open for manifestations of an individual style. For instance, the explicatory speech in lectures is an instructional-scientific or popular science kind of scientific style. Individual manifestations in this style of speech are based on methods of popularization: quoting, comparison, analogy, and intonation (the latter in oral speech only). To make the explanation of material more visualized and comprehensible, the university teacher is expected to use the means of verbal imagery – metaphors, personifications, comparisons, phraseology; syntactical means – rhetoric questions, rhetoric exclamations, analogy, etc.; intonational means – voluntative (advice, order, request), emotive (joy, anger, sadness, shame, indifference, surprise, tenderness, fear, disdain, offence); image-making intonemes (pauses, logical emphasis, rate and melody of speech, its intensity, range, and pitch). All these are the prerequisites for developing the individual style of speech.

It is justifiable to claim that the individual style of speech of a university teacher is a system of language means for exercising pedagogical impact. It is an inherent quality of the teacher who has fully mastered his or her profession, this quality demonstrating his or her unique individuality. It is also an indicator of high level of professional language mastery because the choice of language means, demonstrating the individual approach, is only possible when the teacher has all the variety of such means at his or her command, at the same time having command of his or her individual rhetoric and artistic nature. It is so because the individual style of professional speech is affected by natural qualities of teacher’s personality: temperament, the style of thinking, abilities, as well as social qualities, such as the skills of expressing ideas in speech. The desire to create one’s own style of speech is associated with positive emotions of searching, finding, and discovering, as well as the emotions of the greatest satisfaction in work.

The choice of individual style of speech means the selection, according to the needs of communication: of optimal language and communication means from the general stock of such means shared by the entire nation; of the forms of discourse (oral or written, dialogic or monologic one); of the style of speech (colloquial, official business style, scientific style, etc.); of coloring of speech (formal, intimate, neutral, playful, etc.). The distinctive features of developed teacher’s communication style are the full accordance with the existing language norms and the full command of non-verbal means (mimics, gestures, the rate of speaking, sound pitch, etc.).

Developing such an individual style of speech in postgraduate (PhD) students majoring in Pedagogy – future university teachers – should start with determining the level of their communication culture and their level of communication experience. It should also be taken into account that this experience may have not only positive but also a negative influence. For instance, it is well-known that students often use slang in their speech, and it has even become the inherent property of their communication which is, of course, inacceptable for a future university teacher. In general, it may be said that the level of communication culture of postgraduate students is often rather low which may be the result of reduced interest to reading, indifference to language and to the cultural and stylistic characteristics of one’s own speech, interest only in rendering a certain meaning in communication regardless of the language characteristics of speech in which such meaning is rendered, etc. Students not infrequently have a very limited vocabulary and their grammatical, syntactical, stylistic and other means of expressions lack variety.

However, everything said above are only the apriori assumptions (though based on our teaching experience). There are no exact scientifically proved data concerning the issue in question with regard to the development of individual styles of professional speech of present-day Ukrainian postgraduate students majoring in Pedagogy (future university teachers). Therefore, to suggest some recommendations as to that development, a special practical study is required to clearly demonstrate what the actual situation now is with the formation of future university teachers’ styles of speech (what the level of development of those styles actually is). Only after having determined that level, it is possible to give some recommendations as to further work and research in that direction. Such a study has been conducted by us and it is discussed in the remaining parts of this article.

3. Methodology of the study

The practical study reported in this article and conducted in the years from 2017 until 2019 was only the first part of our research. As it has already been said, its purpose was to obtain the hard facts about Ukrainian postgraduate pedagogy students actual levels of development of individual styles of professional speech. On the basis of such facts, it is planned to launch the second stage of the research devoted to finding in a pedagogical experiment the adequate ways and means for optimally developing students individual styles of speech. This second experimental part is scheduled to be organized beginning from March 2019, with the results to be reported in the following article. The same students will participate in the experiment - all those who were participating in the part of the study reported below. The body of such postgraduate students selected for the research included 147 persons majoring in “Professional Education” (aged from 21 to 24 years of age, two thirds – 98 persons – of them females, one third males). At present, they are studying at four Ukrainian universities: Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Donbas State Pedagogical University, Zaporizhya National University, and Lugansk National University – with a roughly equal number of participants from all the universities.

All the students-participants in this part of the study were divided randomly into two groups: the experimental one (EG) – 74 students and the control one (CG) – 73 students. This division was done in view of the next stage of research – the one where it is planned to form the individual styles of speech in EG students using special ways and means for developing such styles while CG students will be left without a specific style-forming instruction. The results of both groups are scheduled to be compared at the end of the experimental study. But it was absolutely necessary to divide the students into an EG and CG at the pre-experimental stage of research (discussed in this paper) to make sure that students from both groups start participating in the experiment with equal initial levels of individual style of speech development.

The study reported below was designed for obtaining full information concerning those initial levels by solving the following issues:

1. Finding principal constituents and indicators for demonstrating the individual style of teacher’s speech.
2. Determining what tools may be used for ascertaining the level of formation of the constituents of individual style of teacher’s speech.
3. Obtaining the exact data concerning the actual level of formation of the constituents of individual style of teacher’s speech in the students-participants of our study.

As to the first task above, the following constituents and indicators of individual style of teacher’s speech formation have been defined: the motivational one (the personal need for enhancing the skill level of professional speech and the motivation of achievement, i.e. aspiring to achieve success and self-improvement); the cognitive one (the personal knowledge of the styles of teacher’s speech, of social, socio-cultural, professional norms of pedagogical communication, the awareness of communicative strategies and tactics, the orientation in the means of communication that characterize the national mentality and are used in a definite professional community, the awareness of the requirements of teachers’ communicative etiquette); the operational one (the personal level of development of skills required: for clearly formulating one’s ideas and defending one’s position, for convincing the interlocutor, for choosing the communicative behavior while communicating with different social groups and categories of interlocutors, for conducting a dialogue, for listening to, hearing, and understanding another person; the existence of abilities: to respect the interlocutor’s ideas, to focus on the conversation, to create a suitable environment for communication, to obtain feedback, to choose verbal and non-verbal behavior according to the communicative situation, to produce whole, coherent, and logical utterances); the personal one (the degree of empathy and reflection formation).

In what concerns the second task mentioned above, the following diagnostic tools for ascertaining the level of constituent formation of teacher’s speech individual styles have been chosen:

1. The motivational constituent – the level of development of students’ achievement motivation was tested by using the method “The evaluation of the need in achievement” (Raigorodskiy, 1998). The respondents were requested to react with a “Yes” or “No” to 22 statements. Those responses that matched the keys received 1 point each. The total results were divided into three levels of achievement motivation development: the high one (16-19 points), the sufficient one (12-15 points), and the low one (2-11 points).

The level of personal communication needs and the needs of improving personal communication skills was determined using the method “Communication needs” (Raigorodskiy, 1998) when students are supposed to react to statements giving “Yes” or “No” responses. The responses matching the keys receive 1 point each. The obtained data were differentiated according to three levels: 23-33 points meaning the high level of need, 12-22 points being the sufficient level, and 1-11 points the low level of need.

The general level of development of the individual style of speech motivational constituent was determined by obtaining the arithmetic average of the quantitative meanings of each of the two indicators of that constituent.

2. The diagnostics of the cognitive constituent was implemented with the help of calculating the arithmetic average of results obtained when students were completing the authors’ (of this article) own questionnaire and solving situational tasks. The questionnaire includes 35 questions concerning the levels of students’ language knowledge, the knowledge of theory and psychology of communication, and teacher’s speech etiquette. The questions also concern the knowledge about the means of influencing listeners; of establishing, maintaining, and terminating a communicative contact for achieving the communication goal; the means of orientation in oneself, in interlocutors when communicating in professional situations for solving professional tasks; the knowledge of professional culture, etc. The respondents’ answers gave an opportunity of distinguishing three levels of cognitive constituent development: the high one (30-35 points), the sufficient one (20-29 points), and the low one (0-19 points).

Solving professional situational tasks required the participants to develop an individual strategy of modeling a dialogic interaction. The data obtained were differentiated according to levels: 8-10 points meaning the high level of the participant’s view of dialogic interaction, 5-7 points being the sufficient level, and 0-4 points the low one.

The general level of the cognitive constituent formation was determined by obtaining the arithmetic average of the quantitative meanings of each of the indicators of that constituent.

3. Operational constituent diagnostics was performed by means of evaluating the participants’ skills to formulate their ideas clearly and logically, to defend their position, to convince the interlocutor, to choose their communicative behavior while communicating with different social groups and categories of interlocutors, to conduct a dialogue, to listen to, hear, and understand another person. Also evaluated were the participants’ abilities to respect the interlocutor’s ideas, to focus on the conversation, to create a suitable environment for communication, to obtain feedback, to choose verbal and non-verbal behavior according to the communicative situation, to produce whole, coherent, and logical utterances. The diagnostics of all these skills and abilities was done by experts who were higher school teachers observing all the post-graduate students in their class and out-of-class work during all the period of the study. Those 10 experts were requested to mark and evaluate the observed skills and abilities using indicators of intensity and systematicity.

The level of development of the skills and abilities listed above was determined by the experts using the following indicators: a participants fully possesses a certain skill or ability, systematically demonstrating it in learning activities and when modeling different kinds of communication, he or she has a positive attitude towards modeling the individual style of speech (the high level, 3 points); a participant does not have a full command of a certain skill or ability, has problems in learning activities, needs encouragement for modeling different kinds of communication, has a neutral attitude towards modeling the individual style of speech (the sufficient level, 2 points); a participant demonstrates a low (inexpressive) level of skill or ability development, has serious problems in learning activities, is not active when modeling different kinds of communication, has a negative attitude towards modeling the individual style of speech (the low level, 1 point).

4. The diagnostics of the personal constituent of the individual style of speech was done on the basis of evaluating the level of participants’ empathy and reflection development.

The diagnostics of the level of empathy was done following the “Methodology of diagnosing the level of empathic abilities” (Ilyin, 2011). The total indicator when using this methodology can fluctuate from 0 to 36 points. Three levels of empathy were distinguished by us: the high one (30 points and higher); the sufficient one (15-29 points); the low one (14 points and less).

For diagnosing the reflection level, the questionnaire “Determining the level of development of pedagogical reflection” elaborated by Kalashnikova (Kalashnikova, 1999) was used. The questionnaire includes 34 questions requiring a positive or negative answer. The responses matching the keys receive 1 point each, not matching them receive a 0 point. Points from 0 to 11 testify to the low level of reflection development, from 12 to 22 points testify to the sufficient level, from 23 to 34 points to the high level.

The selected constituents, indicators, tools, and procedures for the study allowed conducting it in practice and obtaining the required results for drawing conclusions, thereby solving the third of the three tasks set above.

4. Results and their discussion

The first element of our diagnostics was testing the development of the motivational constituent in the study participants’ individual styles of speech. The generalized results of that diagnostics are shown in Table 1.

Table 1
The level of development of postgraduate students’ motivational
constituent in their individual styles of speech

Analyzing the information in Table 1, it can be seen that only 15% of postgraduate students from the CG and 16.2% from the EG demonstrated a clearly expressed desire to attain some serious success and results in modeling their individual style of speech, as well as a clearly expressed need in communication and the improvement of its skills. These students may be characterized as having initiative, self-confidence, responsibility, self-sufficiency in making decisions. They are distinguished by persistence in achieving their goals and an aspiration to associate as much as possible with other people. On a lower level are 52.0% of postgraduate students from the CG and 50% from the EG. They are eager to achieve positive results in the area relevant to the study, they are willing and active in different kinds of interaction, and however, they are not always able to choose correctly the adequate style and tactics of communication. Regretfully, quite a substantial number of postgraduate students (32.8 % in the CG and 33.7% in the EG) belong to the low level of their motivational constituent development. They have a very low level of achievement motivation; when they begin to do something, they are afraid of failure in advance and think about the possibility of avoiding the task. Performance is always based on clear instructions only and is accompanied by anxiety, low self-confidence, as well as eagerness to avoid responsible tasks.

It is worthy of note that the results in the CG and EG are quite close, though, naturally, not identical, which is important for the following (planned) stage of our research indicating that experimental teaching (formation) of postgraduate students’ individual styles of speech will be started with practically the same or very similar initial levels in both kinds of groups.

The same may be said about the results of studying our participants’ initial cognitive constituent level of formation (and about the results of studying the levels of formation of the two remaining constituents – the operational and the personal ones, – so it will not be mentioned further). These results are shown in Table 2.

Table 2
The level of development of postgraduate students’ cognitive
constituent in their individual styles of speech

The table shows that a high level of cognitive constituent formation is demonstrated by only 6.8% of postgraduate students from the CG and 8.1% from the EG. Despite the fact that many future holders of PhD degree have a sufficient level of that constituent formation, yet, the low level embraces not less than 41% of students in the CG and 37.8% in the EG – which testifies to the lack of knowledge of social, socio-cultural, and professional norms and means of communication, the norms of verbal and non-verbal communicative behavior required for communication in different speech situations, the absence of realization of adequate communicative strategies and tactics.

In this part of the study, a very important part for clarifying the level of development of future teachers’ individual styles of speech was played by professional situational tasks. It is so because, when solving them, future PhD degree holders were expected to formulate their own views on a situation, their own individual strategies of modeling dialogic interaction. The analysis of completed tasks shows that the postgraduate students’ do not have sufficient theoretical knowledge in what concerns interpersonal communication, and their ideas about ways and means of holding professional communication are rather vague, too. It was found that 17% of students are not prepared for positive interpersonal professional intercourse that allows them to settle professional problems without conflicts; 22% have hardly any tangible level of individual style of speech development, and monologic speech, structured logically and consistently, may become an insurmountable obstacle for them. All these factors may be said to demonstrate insufficient development of students’ professional communication skills. They not only are in the way of forming individual styles of speech, they will also become an obstacle when future teachers will try to understand and predict the behavior of other people, will make relationships with them more difficult and social adaptation in professional environment less successful.

The generalized data concerning the formation of the operational constituent of students’ individual style of speech are shown in Table 3.

Table 3
The level of development of postgraduate students’ operational
constituent in their individual styles of speech

It can be seen that the high level of the tested constituent development was demonstrated only by 6 (8.2%) postgraduate students from the CG and 5 (6.8%) postgraduate students from the EG. The sufficient level is characterized by the following indicators: 32 (43.8%) and 35 (47.3%) of students from both groups, while the low level distinguishes 35 (48.0%) and 34 (45.9%) of postgraduate students. This proves that such students mostly have only low and sufficient levels of skill formation making them able to: formulate their ideas clearly, defend their position, convince the interlocutors, choose their communicative behavior while communicating with different social groups and categories of interlocutors, conduct a dialogue, listen to, hear, and understand another person, respect the interlocutor’s ideas, focus on the conversation, create a suitable environment for communication, obtain feedback, choose verbal and non-verbal behavior according to the communicative situation, and produce whole, coherent, and logical utterances.

As it has already been said, the diagnostics of personal constituent formation in postgraduate students’ individual style of speech was completed on the basis of evaluating their levels of empathy and reflection development. The obtained results are shown in Table 4.

Table 4
The level of development of postgraduate students’ personal
constituent in their individual styles of speech

Analyzing the information in Table 4, it can be said that there were 11 (15.0%) postgraduate student in the CG and 13 (17.6%) in the EG who were distinguished by a high level of empathy and reflection development. The sufficient level was demonstrated by 31 (42.5%) students from the CG and 33 (44.6%) students from the EG. All the others (42.5% from the CG and 37.8% from the EG) showed the low level only.

In this manner, again it was proved that the personal constituent (just like all the other ones) was insufficiently developed by the participants of our study. Therefore, it is of great importance to pay enough attention to developing it when, in the experimental part of the research, the formation of students’ individual styles of professional speech will be undertaken. It is so because only empathy and reflection can help a communicant understand the positions of the other communicants, comprehending their reactions and behavior and thereby amending or changing one’s own communicative behavior, adequately analyzing and evaluating it in professional intercourse, as well as predicting the results of one’s own and other communicants’ actions by way of self-evaluating the communication strategies.

After collecting all the data discussed above, we generalized the information concerning the initial level of postgraduate students’ (from both groups) individual styles of speech formation. It was done by generalizing the information given in Tables 1-4. The results are shown in Table 5.

Table 5
The initial (pre-experimental) level of development of
postgraduate students’ individual styles of speech

The results of generalization again confirm the similarity of the CG and EG in what concerns the initial (pre-experimental) levels of development of postgraduate students’ individual styles of speech, thereby making the future comparison of these two groups, after a special experimental instruction in the EG and absence of such an instruction in the CG, quite justifiable and valid. They also confirm that the underdeveloped levels of the absolute majority of students’ individual styles of speech make it quite important to form such styles using specific instructional means and kinds of learning activities. Consequently, the results of the study reported in this article show that its goal has been achieved and, what is the most important, they justify the necessity of conducting the second (experimental) part of our research.

5. Conclusions

The article reports the results of the first stage of the research devoted to studying and developing the individual styles of professional speech of postgraduate (PhD) students majoring in Pedagogy – future university teachers. The individual style of speech of a university teacher is defined as a system of individually colored language means for exercising pedagogical impact. It is an inherent quality of the teacher who has fully mastered his or her profession, this quality demonstrating his or her unique individuality. The individual style of speech is considered as consisting of four principal constituents: the motivational one, the cognitive one, the operational, and the personal constituents, each of them having its own system of indicators and characteristics. Actually, only the development and gaining command of such an individual style of professional speech in the unity of all its four constituents can be regarded as a crowning point in training a really qualified university teacher.

Our apriori hypothesis based on our practical experience was that postgraduate pedagogical students in their majority did not have such styles developed sufficiently and, therefore, it is an absolute necessity in their professional preparation to train those styles thoroughly and efficiently using specially elaborated instructional, linguistic, and cultural techniques.

To conduct such a multi-faceted research, first of all, it was important to ascertain that our apriori hypothesis was correct and postgraduate students did not in fact have adequate mastery of individual styles of professional speech. The goal of the part of the study reported in this article was checking just this cardinal point fundamental for the entire research.

Our practical study has fully and convincingly proved the initial assumption demonstrating that only the absolute minority of 147 postgraduate students involved in it were in command of adequately developed individual styles of professional speech while in all the others those styles were obviously underdeveloped and necessitated special pedagogical (instructional) efforts for their formation.

Thus, the reported study has laid a sound foundation for the following stages of the research which presuppose not only the elaboration of specific instructional means for organized and purposeful development of postgraduate students’ individual styles of professional speech but also using those means in experimental teaching/learning practice to ascertain that they indeed ensure much higher learning outcomes in the experimental group of students in comparison with the control group where they are not planned to be introduced. The discussion of those means as well as of the procedures and results of the experimental part of the study is the perspective of our next article.

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1. Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine

2. Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine, E-mail: otarnopolsky@ukr.net

3. Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine