Thesis: Innovation in Imitation
Imitation and innovation seem to be two different stages in the composition training process. However, compulsory education Chinese textbooks organically combine the two, reflecting not only the general trend from imitation to innovation, but also the specific requirements for innovation in imitation. Therefore, based on our own teaching practice, we talk about our understanding of composition teaching in the first stage of junior high school Chinese.
1
Compulsory education Chinese language "outline" changes the "listening, speaking, reading and writing" in the old "outline" to "reading, writing, listening, speaking", emphasizing Understand the importance and fundamental status of reading and writing. At the same time, the layout of the textbook not only establishes an observation system in reading, teaching students to draw nutrients from the treasure house of life, but also forms a step-by-step writing system, dividing composition training into fragments and whole articles, and interspersing them in text exercises and unit exercises respectively. . It can be seen that innovation in imitation means to use reading to promote writing, to write to promote reading, and to penetrate composition into reading.
Will imitation turn the composition into a mechanical production of "painting a gourd and a scoop", or even have the negative effect of "painting a tiger-like dog"? How can imitation lead to innovation?
The scientific research on thinking believes that similar blocks (i.e., knowledge units accumulated by people in learning and practice and stored in the brain) exist in large numbers in objective things and the thinking activities of cognitive subjects, and all innovations are It is a comprehensive similar shape or larger system that is nested together, from small to large, from low-level to high-level (original text can be found in the book "Science Exploration of Thinking"). Beveridge said: "Originality often lies in discovering connections or similarities between two or more research objects or ideas." Reading is to store and enrich similar blocks in students' brains. Imitation in writing is the process of automatic convergence, connection, and activation of a large number of similar blocks in the brain. The resulting similarities and differences are the results of innovative thinking.
Psychological research has proven that the thinking development of junior high school students is in a process from concrete to abstract, from low-level to high-level. The images or representations in students' thinking will gradually give way to concepts through accumulation, and they will gradually transform from empirical abstract logical thinking to theoretical abstract logical thinking. This development and transformation are inseparable from specific images, that is, imitation.
From the perspective of literary studies, “In the process of mastering language and various skills, as well as in the initial stage of artistic practice, people must rely on imitation. Consciously following advanced examples can absorb the ideas of others. Experience, expand one's own experience, and serve as the basis for further creativity" (see "Imitation" in "Cihai"). Writing is a skill that must be acquired through transfer of existing experience and developed and improved in practice. In short, once you know "how to do it", you still have to "do it" yourself, that is, consciously imitate it. Lu Ji's "Wen Fu" said that "the past becomes new" and "the turbidity becomes clearer"; Liu Xie's "Wen Xin Diao Long" said "the husband's youth is born from blue, and crimson is born from Qian. Although it exceeds its original color, it cannot be transformed again." , all refer to innovation in imitation. Throughout the ages, there are countless masterpieces imitated by famous artists, such as Wang Bo's sentence "The falling clouds and solitary swans fly together, the autumn water is the same color as the sky", Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman", and so on.
From a teaching perspective, the compulsory textbook divides the process of Chinese learning into three stages: from simple to complex, from easy to difficult, from general training to practical training, and from sub-item training to comprehensive training. , embodies the rules of people's understanding of things and the rules of students' learning, that is, understanding-analysis-synthesis. A large amount of composition training is mainly based on imitation, followed by several methods such as variation, reference, comment, appreciation, etc., forming a serialized scientific system, which is reflected in the process of a student moving from pure imitation to gradually getting rid of imitation and entering creation. Furthermore, “texts are nothing more than examples” (Ye Shengtao), which are demonstrative and intuitive. This requires students to master knowledge through reading, draw inferences from one instance, draw analogies, and turn knowledge into abilities. Therefore, imitation can play a "bridge" role from reading to writing.
To learn calligraphy, you need to copy calligraphy, to learn painting, you need to copy, and to learn acting, you need to imitate. Likewise, writing is inseparable from imitation.
2
Due to the different ways of combining reading and writing, the methods and difficulty of imitating compositions are also different. Taking picture composition as an example, the first stage of teaching in junior middle schools focuses on explaining or describing the pictures; the second stage focuses on analyzing, commenting or expressing feelings about the pictures. Therefore, the first stage of Chinese teaching starts from cultivating general absorption and expression skills, and arranges a large number of imitation and variation exercises in conjunction with the text. Let’s analyze this with an example.
(1) Imitation
Imitation is a means of basic training. It is the training of writing according to the style (including content) provided by the model essay. For junior high school students, when they are at a loss in writing, they will naturally be inspired if they can follow the "law" and the "chapter". Imitation can generally be carried out from the following aspects:
1. Imitate content and cultivate observation skills
Although the back of the father in Zhu Ziqing's works is tear-jerking and unforgettable, if it lacks life Experience shows that it is difficult for students to get excited. An exercise was deliberately arranged after the article "Back View", asking students to talk about the "new magnificent back view" in their minds.
When we guided students to practice, we grasped the dilemma, old state, and state of mind of Zhu Ziqing’s father for analysis. We asked students to find similar emotional points in family life, observe and describe them carefully. Based on this, the students imitated the old back of grandma with white hair flowing, the sad back of mother when sobbing, the swaying back of father when carrying a load, etc. Among them, one student looked out the window and observed the back of his father hunched over his desk under the lamp preparing for lessons, and sighed: "Isn't this curved back a bridge? A bridge for students to walk towards the future!" This sentence comes from life, and it comes from the heart. Contains new ideas. These are all inspired by "Back View" to trigger associations and touch the emotional hub. It can be seen that imitating the content of the text exercises students' eyes for "discovering beauty".
2. Imitation of language to cultivate students’ language sensitivity
“It can only be understood, not expressed”, which is often the common feature of those thought-provoking languages. For junior high school students, if this "ineffable" is "expressed in words" too deeply and in detail, it will make them lose the temptation and pleasure of communicating with God. Therefore, students' psychological characteristics should be grasped in teaching, and students should enhance their sense of language through repeated reading, and then imitate to understand, thereby improving students' own ability to use language.
The textbook includes some language imitation exercises, some imitating sentence patterns and some imitating fragments. Imitation of language cannot be separated from the specific language environment. For example, the description of bird hunting in the snow in "From Baicao Garden to Sanwei Bookstore" is both vivid and realistic, and the series of verbs used in conjunction highlight the "interest" of Baicao Garden. Therefore, the author focuses on "interest" to inspire students and teaches them to find "interest" in after-school games, such as cow rubber band jumping, "eagle catching chickens", "cockfighting", "swinging", etc., and then use The precise verb expresses "interest". In this way, students' imitation becomes a description of their own game process and an imitation of sample essay fragments, forming a unity of their own experience and the experience of others, thereby enhancing their ability to feel and use language.
3. Imitate techniques and cultivate specific writing skills
Different from writing textbooks, model essays indirectly display writing knowledge and specifically express writing skills. Its indirectness, concreteness and demonstration require students to unify reading and imitation, turn other people's experiences into their own, and promote the transfer of writing knowledge.
For example, learning the contrasting technique of using sound to write silence in "Laoshan Jie" can guide students to imitate the excerpts of "Reading at Night under the Lamp", so that they can naturally think of the sounds and pages turning in the dead of night. The sound, the sound of the pen tip scratching, other people's snoring, the barking of dogs, etc. are used to express the feeling of restlessness in a quiet night using metaphors. In this way, students can further develop their creativity and practice contrasting techniques such as using ugliness to describe beauty, using evil to describe good, and using sadness to describe joy.
4. Imitation of ideas, expanding students’ thinking space
The previous imitation is based on the article as the ontology; imitation of ideas is imitation on the author as the ontology. From the perspective of reading psychology, in order to deeply understand the text and experience the author's feelings, we often rely on the psychological process of identification and restoration. That is to say, while reading, you become the author, experience the situation, do the things yourself, enter a state without "I", and grasp the author's thinking process; after reading, you can return to the reader, and appreciate and comment from a distance. Therefore, imitation train of thought is a higher level of imitation, which can effectively expand students' thinking space.
For example, the imitation at the end of the text of "Three Fables" requires us to develop our imagination based on the concept of Hua Junwu's comics and write about Guifu's third race. When guiding copywriting, teachers can grasp Hua Junwu's innovative thinking in the creation of comics and analyze the characteristics of his unconventional, unexpected and original ideas. Therefore, students naturally imagine the outcome of the third race: the tortoise and the hare both win or suffer a disastrous defeat. The competition is now complete, and the requirements of the essay are met.
Imitation is for creation. Therefore, when conducting imitation training, you should select the imitation points of the model essay, pay attention to the unity of content and form, and achieve both physical and spiritual similarity. But it seems too much like "superstition", but not like "confusion" at the same time. The model essay should not frame the composition, and students' imitation should be kept between similarity and dissimilarity, that is, innovation should be achieved in imitation.
(2) Varied writing
Make some changes to the content or form of the sample essay, and write a composition that is basically similar but different from the original text. This kind of training is called variant writing. It goes one step further than imitation writing and is a "'semi-creative' composition" (Qian Menglong's words)
The methods of changing writing generally include abbreviation, expansion, rewriting, continuation, etc., which are combined below The textbook talks about specific methods.
1. Abbreviation
Abbreviation is a way of compressing and simplifying the article according to certain requirements while the central meaning and main content remain unchanged. It is not an excerpt or a modification of the article, so the meaning and structure should be kept relatively intact.
For example, "The Creation of Pangu" is a mythical story, and there is an exercise to make a reading summary at the end of the text, which requires a more specific description. Instruct students to practice. They can master the content of this article by first imagining, "opening up" and then imagining "changes", as well as the characteristics of multiple parallelisms in sentence patterns. They can delete branches and leaves, retain the main stem, and change detailed descriptions into rough narratives to summarize the main content of this article.
Abbreviations can not only cultivate students' reading analysis ability, but also improve students' comprehensive summary ability and language reproduction ability.
2. Expansion
Expansion is the opposite of abbreviation, that is, it is to transform a short article into a long article. It should be enriched and specific, but also refined and vivid, rather than repeating luō＠① verbose , superfluous.
The commonly used methods for expansion are "adding branches and leaves" and "adding trunks". The former is to expand by adding reasonable fictional elements, and the latter is to expand the simple content of the original text. Both of them change generalizations into specifics. For example, the article "Bian Que Meets Duke Huan of Cai" ends the story with "Bian Que has fled Qin" and "Gong Huan died". This is extremely general and is also a good material for expansion practice. To guide the expansion, students can be asked to grasp the character traits of Bian Que and Duke Huan, use the "increasing trunk method" to describe the turmoil in Bian Que's escape from Qin in detail, and use the "adding branches and leaves method" to describe in detail Duke Huan's demeanor and expression before his death. Language, actions, etc.
This kind of expansion is helpful to enhance students' logical thinking ability, develop imagination, and improve description and narrative skills.
3. Continuation writing
Continuation writing is a training method to complete unfinished articles or events. It can promote students to further understand and digest the original work and develop creative imagination ability. The most important thing about imagination is that it is reasonable, that is, it conforms to the creative intention of the original author and the internal logic of the article. Therefore, continuation is a reasonable extension and development of the original text.
For example, "The Emperor's New Clothes" provides two sequels at the end. One is about the emperor killing innocent people indiscriminately, and the other is about the emperor criminalizing children who tell the truth. After the article, students are asked to write a sequel. How is it different from the previous two articles and consistent with the author's intention of mocking the feudal rulers? We asked students to try to figure out the word "seem" from the original sentence "He felt that what the people said seemed to be true", and combined it with the character traits of the emperor and ministers to imagine, will the emperor become smarter after returning to the palace? Will ministers tell the truth? As a result, the students suddenly understood and their minds were active. Some devised a new scam in which a liar offered a magic mirror, and some described a ridiculous scene in which the queen played the emperor.
Since it is a continuation of writing, you should pay attention to the continuity and completeness of the article, and it should not be "distinct" or have a beginning or a missing end.
4. Rewriting
Rewriting is a training method that changes the form of expression according to the content of the original text. It is conducive to training students' ability to express the same content in different ways of expression. There are generally several forms of rewriting, namely changing genre, changing person, changing structure, changing expression, changing style, changing angle, etc. The basic content remains unchanged during rewriting.
When guiding rewriting, students should first be asked to grasp the central meaning of the original text, then clearly see the specific requirements, and work hard on casting materials and conceiving ideas. For example, "The Last Lesson" requires rewriting text fragments in the third person. This will widen the psychological distance between Little Franz and the students, allowing students to objectively understand the role of clue characters and the deep connotation of the work. Yun. This is a paraphrase that changes the person's pronoun. Another example is that after teaching Zhang Zhihe's "Yu Gezi", in order to appreciate the poet's taste, the words can be rewritten into prose, and students can be guided to evoke associations through reading, and then use beautiful writing styles to depict the bright pictures that come to mind, so as to appreciate Zhang Zhihe's unrestrained Rivers and lakes, the secluded taste of mountains and rivers. For another example, music composition is very difficult. How can students get inspiration from the text? When we guide, we use poems such as "Guilin Landscape Song" and "Sky Market in the Sky" for analysis. We ask students to grasp the similarities and associate and imagine, so that the musical image can be integrated into the students' psychological processes, and then the auditory sense can be combined with words in the form of words. Image transformed into visual image. At the same time, we selected two pieces of music, "Er Fountain Reflects the Moon" and "Journey to Suzhou" during teaching, and asked students to compare the different musical moods of the two pieces. The former is sad and weeping; the latter is joyful. , like crazy. In this way, students can use life experience to expand their imagination and make bold and vivid descriptions.
Therefore, when rewriting, you should pay attention to the characteristics of different expression forms and make full use of the strengths of specific expression forms.
In short, changing writing cultivates students’ basic writing skills, especially their creativity in reading comprehension. It is a ready-made composition material and therefore a convenient way to test the degree and ability of students to combine reading and writing.
Three
Using preliminary imitation to train students’ writing skills is easy to get started and effective for junior high school students who have just entered middle school. The penetration of composition in combining reading and writing can enable students to absorb the experience of their predecessors and turn them into their own, and promote the transfer of knowledge into abilities. It is an extension of reading and better promotes reading, forming a virtuous cycle.
But imitation is not an end, but a means. When teachers guide students to imitate, they should start from the students' specific characteristics, teach students in accordance with their aptitude, and gradually improve. Particular attention should be paid to not only guiding students to find "sources of living water" from life and touching "similar blocks" to collide with life to generate sparks of inspiration, but also to improve students' ability to control language in writing, develop intelligence, and protect their creativity. In a word, the penetration of composition in the first stage of junior high school Chinese language should show the positive trend of innovation in imitation.
;