Systemic Description of the Student’s Language Consciousness: Teacher’s Image

Abstract

The paper discusses the results of a series of experiments aimed at studying how the teacher image changes in the student’s mind with time. The hypothesis of the study was as follows: during the years of study at the university the image of the teacher undergoes significant changes not only due to the student teacher interaction, but also due to the personal evaluation of this activity. This hypothesis was tested by a series of experiments conducted by the methods of free associations and unfinished sentences, the results of which complement each other. The hypothesis was confirmed: a change in the teacher image in the student’s linguistic consciousness is due not only to gaining experience of interaction with the teacher, but also, to a large extent, due to his personal emotional experience. The image of the teacher “consists” of specific features, properties, and characteristics rather than of the actions carried out by the teacher. The image of the teacher in the undergraduate’s linguistic consciousness is more specific and individual and less stereotypical than the same image in the linguistic consciousness of the first-year student. Negative evaluation of images increases with the first-year and fourth-year students, but not dramatically, because positive judgments and attitudes, also found in the answers of the undergraduates, receive greater differentiation. In general, both the modality and the emotions become more diverse in the associations and answers of the fourth-year students during their stay at the university, which indicates a certain development in the images of consciousness under study.