Russian language textbook as agent of change: from USSR to the new century

The relevance of studying the linguistic parameters of the text in the Russian language textbook as a separate genre is determined, on the one hand, by the absence of clear linguistic criteria for a standard textbook in Russian studies, and on the other hand, by the increased criticism of the textbook language after the revision of the Federal State Educational Standard. The research is aimed at identifying differences and similarities of Russian language textbooks for 5th graders published in 1935-1974 and 2012-2015. Consistent description, analysis of their structure, content, and language with methods of corpus linguistics, text analytics and automatic profiling with RuLingva analyzer confirmed our hypothesis that representing the same genre, Russian language textbooks of the two historical periods have linguistic differences. The authors proved that the composition common to all textbooks - linguistic theory, texts of assignments and exercises, artistic and educational texts of exercises - varies significantly in size and communicative strategies. Compositional similarity realized in all textbooks in sequential arrangement of theory and exercises, is not found only in the oldest textbook of 1935 by Shapiro, which has separate chapters for rules and exercises. The modern textbooks differ mostly in texts of instructions which are 2.5 times longer than in Soviet textbooks; their motivational questions have a tendency to dialogism. Directives in Soviet textbooks contain traditional incentives in the form of direct verbal imperatives. Illustrative sources of modern textbooks are more various and include research texts from humanities, natural sciences, and turn-of-the-century fiction. Much more diverse typography of modern textbooks contributes to text comprehension. The prospects of the study imply identifying the content preferences of the authors of textbooks of the two periods and systematic parameterization of the textbooks vocabulary, its lexical-syntactic and discourse analysis.