FOLK GAMES – STIMULUS IN THE LITERARY AND LANGUAGE TRAINING OF STUDENTS FROM PEDAGOGICAL MAJORS

Abstract

Folk games are the subject of research by ethnography, cultural studies, pedagogy, and psychology. In recent years,they have become an intersection and a means of exchanging experiences for many specialists. The exhibition presents the results of the research of students from two pedagogical specialties at Burgas State University „Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov“. They are examined through the vocation of teaching the Bulgarian language and literature to children and students from 3 to 10 years of age. In the initial stage, students provide recordings of games from their childhood, the rules, and the way of participating in them. The choice of folk games is directly dependent on their reception in the settlement, related to the life of the studied – big city, small town, village; from ethnicity; from the age of the students.
Acquiring information about their specifics, they classify them according to four criteria:
- according to their basis.
- according to the object they reflect;
- according to the participation of the word in them;
- according to pedagogical intervention.
The obtained results are based on predominant legal games, influenced by the children’s worldview, synthesizing the subject environment and the world, betting on the observance of certain rules.
After completing the lecture module on the Methodology of Bulgarian Language and Literature, the students fill out a questionnaire that reveals their desire to use not so much traditional motifs, but current game resources. They see in folk games an opportunity to educate ethnic tolerance and a means of presenting information in a casual way about the Bulgarian holiday-ritual system, without underestimating the main function of the game – entertainment. This convinces us of their quality educational and theoretical training and their pedagogical pragmatism. The collected factual material allows us to claim that folk games are distinguished above all by their entertainment, but have both educational and cultural value.
The studied students are motivated to use folk games in the education of their future graduates because they realize their high educational potential.
At the beginning of the new century, children’s folk games moved away from the traditional idea of preserving domestic-regional realities and emphasized the dynamics of personal and group relationships between peers.