Abstract: The teaching methods of Chinese reading in primary schools under the new curriculum concept are flexible and diverse. As the main spiritual food for children's reading, children's literature has a natural connection with cultivating children's reading ability. First of all, mastering the language symbols of children's literature can improve children's cognitive analysis ability; Secondly, feeling the literary image of children's literature can improve children's aesthetic ability; Thirdly, grasping the literary connotation of children's literature can develop children's associative expansion ability.
Keywords: children's reading ability; child literature
Chinese teaching in primary schools mainly cultivates children's literacy, reading, composition and oral communication skills. Reading and composition are the two most important aspects of children's Chinese literacy. Therefore, the Chinese Curriculum Standard for Full-time Compulsory Education (Experimental Draft) (hereinafter referred to as the Chinese Curriculum Standard) stipulates the reading requirements as follows:
"Reading is an important way to collect and process information, understand the world, develop thinking and gain aesthetic experience. Reading teaching is a process of dialogue among students, teachers and texts. "
"Reading is students' personalized behavior, and teachers' analysis should not replace students' reading practice. Let students deepen their understanding and experience, feel and think, be infected by emotions, gain ideological enlightenment and enjoy aesthetic pleasure in active thinking and emotional activities. We should cherish students' unique feelings, experiences and understanding. "
"The focus of reading teaching is to cultivate students' ability to feel, understand, appreciate and evaluate. The cultivation of this comprehensive ability can be emphasized in each period, but it should not be separated mechanically. "
"Gradually cultivate students' ability of inquiry reading and creative reading, advocate multi-angle and creative reading, use reading expectation, reading reflection and reading criticism to expand thinking space and improve reading quality. "
These words tell us that children's reading ability mainly includes cognitive analysis ability, aesthetic appreciation ability and association expansion ability. Although there are many ways to improve children's reading ability, children's literature plays an important role in improving children's reading ability. According to statistics, more than 80% of the texts in Chinese teaching in six-year primary schools belong to children's literature (from the perspective of literature), which shows that children's literature has become the main teaching material in Chinese classroom teaching in primary schools. Children's literature is also the main content of primary school students' extracurricular reading, which provides rich materials for primary school students to carry out extracurricular activities. It can be seen that children's literature education has become the main body of Chinese education in primary schools, and children's literature has become the main text to improve children's literature reading ability. Children's literature is the art of language, and the expressive function of language has reached the extreme in children's literature works. Excellent children's literature writers either express the beauty of natural humanity with poetic pen and ink, or express the misfortune of suffering life with implicit and euphemistic style, or expose the stain of social reality with ironic and humorous brushstrokes. This excellent children's literature is not only the best model for children to learn languages, but also the spiritual treasure for children to become "people". As herzen said, "Goethe and Shakespeare are worth a whole university. A person has experienced the times through reading, not just picking up the final and clarified results in science, but like a traveling companion who walks together and embarks on a tortuous road. " 〔 1〕
Since children's literature plays such an important role in children's reading and growth, as a teacher with children's literature literacy and high reading analysis ability, he needs to explore an ideal reading teaching model to improve the quality of Chinese classroom teaching and effectively guide primary school students' extracurricular reading and activities. Therefore, in classroom teaching, his teaching of excellent children's literature works in textbooks can not only stay on the understanding of words, words and sentences and the education of moral quality, nor will he be satisfied with teaching students the structural methods and central expressions of articles. He should consciously guide students to feel the unique aesthetic characteristics of works, improve students' aesthetic ability of literature and art, and strive to explore the relationship between children's literature and the cultivation of children's reading ability. When reading children's literature, children feel three basic levels from the outside to the inside: language symbols-literary images-literary implications. These three levels clearly tell us that children have three indispensable links in the process of reading children's literature: recognizing language symbols, mastering information and improving children's cognitive analysis ability; Reproduce literary images, cultivate imagination and improve children's aesthetic ability; Excavate literary connotation, exercise thinking, and develop children's associative expansion ability.
First, the language symbols of children's literature and children's cognitive analysis ability
Semiotics regards literature as a spiritual world constructed by symbols. In literary reading, we should seek the meaning and value of the text, that is, the meaning and value of literary symbols, because literary symbols are the carriers of literary meaning and value. It is generally believed that language is a symbol system to express ideas, in which words are symbols, sentences are symbol chains, and speeches or articles composed of words and sentences are a collection of symbols. British scholar Terence Hawkes thinks when expounding the function of language: "When language is used to convey information, its cognitive or referential function comes into play;" When language is used to express the emotional attitude of the speaker or author, its function of expressing emotion is displayed. "(2) The symbols of Chinese characters in China are ideographic as well. From the symbols of Chinese characters, we can see the organic unity of external "image" and internal "intention". In other words, Saussure's combination of the perceptual signifier and the abstract signified has achieved a high-level perfect realization in Chinese characters. However, written language is a symbol of words, and it has no image itself. We should try to turn it into an image and let children get a practical aesthetic experience. As the French writer Francois said in Flowers of Paradise, "What is a book? The main thing is just a series of small printed marks. It is to let readers add their own formal colors and emotions, so that those marks can be activated accordingly. Whether a book is dull or full of life, whether emotions are as hot as fire or as cold as ice depends on the reader's own experience. (3) (20) In other words, the abstractness of language symbols makes the images it creates and the emotions it expresses lose their direct sensibility. If children want to feel the artistic image through the text, they must use their own cognition and analysis to melt the language symbols and reconstruct the image, so that the author's experience and emotion can be changed from a solidified materialized form to a flowing conceptual form.
According to psychological knowledge, children's cognitive process is to receive information from the environment, store information, extract and manipulate information as needed, and then make explicit reactions. Information processing combines the perceptual part (such as feeling, perception, attention and memory) with the rational part (thinking) in the cognitive process to form a complete control system from input to output. (4) Children are different from adults, who have some experience in reading and living, and it is easy to transform characters into images in their minds when recreating their imagination. Children are often difficult to grasp the connotation of the beauty of words because of their age and lack of aesthetic experience, so teachers need to kneel down and arouse their aesthetic experience, stimulate their imagination and let them fully feel the charm of literature in a way that children can understand. However, the traditional Chinese reading teaching in China pays more attention to the study of words and texts, and likes to study the author's skills of choosing words and making sentences and arranging articles from the perspective of expression. In order to effectively improve children's reading ability, in the process of Chinese teaching in primary schools, we should take classic children's literature works as models, and cultivate children's ability to obtain information through children's literature texts according to children's cognitive characteristics and modern reading concepts (modern reading concepts focus on obtaining information from written materials quickly and accurately). The information of the article includes main information and auxiliary information. If we fully discover this information, we can complete the basic requirements of reading. For example, the surface information of Book 1, Paper Boat and Kite, the second grade of primary school Chinese in the new curriculum standard, is that squirrels and bears live at the top of the mountain and the other one lives at the foot of the mountain. They wished each other happiness through kites and paper boats and became good friends. But one day, they quarreled over a trivial matter. There were no more kites floating on the top of the mountain and no more paper boats floating in the stream. Squirrels and bears are very sad. A few days later, the squirrel wrote a sentence on the paper boat: "If you are willing to make up, go and fly a kite." In the evening, the squirrel saw a beautiful kite flying towards it. It puts the paper boat into the stream. The inner message is that the author shows that children's hearts are pure and clear, and they treat everything sincerely because they know nothing about the world. What it shows is an extremely transparent, pure and true friendship.
Teachers should turn their attention to more children's literature works after completing classroom teaching, because any children's literature works must not exist in isolation, and it must occupy a certain position in the relationship. In essence, "cognition" always aims to achieve this essential goal, that is, to restore special children's literature works to the rules and sequences of general works. Therefore, every kind of "cognition" has this feature: "It is not a simple imitation, but a primitive and formal power. It does not passively express the simple fact that something exists, but contains an independent human spiritual force. Through this kind of energy, the simple existence of the phenomenon has gained some kind of' meaning' and gained special and conceptual content. " [5] Then, after reading a work with a certain type of characteristics, children will inevitably get a conceptual program in their own "cognitive" field. For example, after teaching paper boats and kites, children can be guided to read Ye Shengtao's Little White Boat. In the process of reading, children will find that in The Little White Boat, the surface information is that the author praises the beauty and interest of the field and shows the "future field". The first sentence at the beginning of The Little White Boat, "The brook is the home of all kinds of lovely things", has brought us into a beautiful and peaceful situation. In this "future field", all kinds of creatures can freely stretch their lives: "There is a subtle sound on the water, and the fish are playing music. They will play wonderful music in their unique way: "pluck … pluck" is wonderful. They invited Xiao Honghua to dance with them; Lu Ping wanted to show off her beautiful clothes, so she followed the quiet and humorous field scenery. Fish were playing happily, and a small white boat carrying innocent children was floating in the wind with "lively and beautiful children". Anything, even if lost, was helped by good people. The deep message is that "children" and fish live in harmony and do not invade each other, and jointly build a beautiful and poetic fairy tale realm. The world is full of truth, goodness, beauty and purity, which shows the writer's pursuit of an ideal, harmonious, sincere and loving life. This kind of teaching can be said that children grasp the surface and deep information conveyed by the text through the literary images created and constructed by writers, so as to realize the communication between readers and authors and effectively complete the task of Chinese reading teaching.
Second, the literary image of children's literature and children's aesthetic appreciation ability
Under the influence of language symbols, children readers can evoke a series of corresponding tangible literary images in their minds through imagination and association, and form a touching artistic world, which is the second level of literary works-literary image level. Regarding the literary image, Luacs once pointed out in Art and Objective Reality: "The goal of every great art is to provide a realistic portrait. Here, the opposition between image and essence, individual and law, directness and concept is eliminated, so that the two are integrated into a spontaneous unity in the direct impression of works of art, which is an inseparable whole for the recipient. " [6] The "realistic portrait" mentioned here is the literary image. The literary image of children's literature has two meanings: one refers to the artistic image created by the combination of the writer's emotion and the image of life (the image of things). For example, in Send a Young Reader, Bing Xin is full of her personal feelings of missing, longing, appreciation or sympathy, and depicts the natural scenery and exotic teenagers with blond hair and blue eyes. Secondly, the literary images in the text are not directly composed of physical images, but are transformed and recreated by the psychological mechanism of the receiver under the stimulation of a series of language symbols. For example, when reading The Ugly Duckling, readers will truly feel that The Ugly Duckling is not only limited to reflecting some realities of European society at that time, but also definitely not limited to being a single symbol of the author Andersen's life path. It describes the universality of the whole world and all human life to the greatest extent, and describes all the difficult mental processes that once had inferiority complex and got rid of it to reach the ideal state. Because children's literature is created according to the law of beauty, the literary image of children's literature provides an aesthetic basis for children. In the process of reading children's literature, children can indirectly understand society, history and life, receive education and be influenced by beauty while enjoying aesthetic pleasure. However, to appreciate the unique charm of literary images, so as to impress and infect children emotionally, children need to feel and understand the feelings and principles of works on the basis of reading, using artistic thinking and relying on creative imagination and association. Therefore, when reading children's literary works, children's aesthetic appreciation ability can be improved by reproducing literary images and exerting children's imagination. It is embodied in the following three aspects.
First, improve children's aesthetic sensibility. Aesthetic sensibility refers to the ability of aesthetic subject to reflect the information conveyed by aesthetic object. There are not only simple physiological sensory factors, but also sensory factors that accumulate rational content. (7) (232) In terms of physiological sensory factors, it refers to the sensory ability of the aesthetic subject, which shows that the subject has a strong interest in the perceptual characteristics of things and can maintain a high degree of sensitivity in aesthetic practice. For example, children may feel emotional comfort when they hear nursery rhymes and see children's language, so they will be more interested in reading. As for the sensory factors of accumulating rational content, it refers to the aesthetic reaction that the aesthetic subject unconsciously mobilizes various psychological functions while obtaining physiological pleasure, and refers to the aesthetic psychological accumulation and sensory experience in the early stage. For example, when children read a certain number of children's literary works, due to the reading experience accumulated in aesthetic feeling, children have a specific aesthetic feeling for the literary images they come into contact with. In this way, children will quickly understand the corresponding connotation from the external characteristics and symbols of aesthetic objects, so when they see foxes, wolves, white rabbits, old cows and monkeys, they will have corresponding aesthetic reactions such as cunning, fierceness, liveliness, kindness and cleverness.
Secondly, cultivate children's aesthetic ability. Aesthetics refers to the aesthetic judgment and judgment after analyzing and synthesizing the aesthetic characteristics of aesthetic objects, and aesthetics refers to the aesthetic level and ability shown in this aesthetic judgment and judgment. [7] (232) If children's aesthetic psychological characteristics are combined, we can understand that in the process of reading children's literary works, they will mobilize the aesthetic experience of the subject to develop rich free association, and correspond the aesthetic characteristics of children's literary works with the knowledge, emotion and meaning of children's subjects, thus generating rich aesthetic imagination and creating a profound aesthetic realm. Plutarch, an ancient Roman educator, said that children's mind is "not a jar to be filled, but a kindling to be lit", so we need to light the kindling of children's mind through children's literature works, so that children can constantly practice the aesthetic images created by writers, which will effectively cultivate children's reading aesthetic ability. For example, Gunter Spencer, a German contemporary children's literature writer, wrote a short fairy tale "The House on Sunflower Street": The old house and its owner, Mr. Pompoli, lived together for generations, so they had deep feelings, rescued and protected the owner's family several times, and remained loyal to the owner. However, Mr. Burberry thinks the old house is old and wants to sell it and buy a new one. The old house didn't want to leave its owner, and tried every means not to let the owner sell it. Its tricks scared off one buyer after another, but aroused great interest from a newly married couple who loved novelty and insisted on buying an old house. In desperation, the old house had to run away. Finally, Mr. Pompoli finally found the old house and decorated it, determined to be a loyal old house forever. If children often read this kind of works, they will judge the meaning of the works on the basis of reappearing, experiencing and feeling the ingenious image of the old house: the author highlights the spiritual quality of loyalty to the old house with the help of fairy tales, aiming at praising a person's noble quality of loyalty and trustworthiness among friends, even if he encounters any unexpected changes.
Third, improve children's aesthetic comprehension. Aesthetic comprehension is an aesthetic process of further understanding, analyzing and grasping the aesthetic characteristics of things on the basis of aesthetic judgment. [7] (233) aesthetic comprehension is also a process of understanding and grasping the aesthetic characteristics of things, which is a leap from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge, from individual grasp to particularity, and then to universality. Thinking from this level, we can find that when reading children's literature works, children often start with the understanding of the external relations of various things in the works, and then deeply understand and know the relationship between phenomenon and essence, content and form, contingency and inevitability, possibility and reality, and the internal relations of things, so as to accumulate the aesthetic attributes of certain things and continuously improve their aesthetic understanding. For example, when children read Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, they found that this fairy tale described that the happy prince gave all his most precious things to the poor, and finally he was heartbroken because of sympathy for the swallow who helped him, but its connotation was the lofty spiritual realm of the happy prince's dedication to love. Take this text as an example, and then guide children to read more fairy tales, so that children will understand the vivid images and bizarre plots of fairy tales, which can often lead people to think about deeper social contents, such as the relationship between people, the relationship between people and nature, the distinction between beauty and ugliness, the roots of justice and evil, and so on.
Schiller once pointed out: "Aesthetic education makes everything obey the law of beauty and expresses inner life in the form it gives external life." [8] It can be seen that if similar reading is often carried out in Chinese teaching in primary schools, then children will infiltrate their own aesthetic experience in the aesthetic feeling of literary images, thus directly entering the level of philosophical rational understanding and essential grasp of literary works.
Thirdly, the literary implication of children's literature and children's ability to expand their association.
The implication level of literature refers to the thoughts and feelings contained in the text, which is the "highest spiritual realm" level mentioned by Zong Baihua and the philosophical connotation of "writing poetry is more philosophical than writing history" mentioned by Aristotle. In China's classical aesthetics, "the image beyond the image", "the scenery beyond the scene" and "the endless implication between the lines" are also explanations of the meaning of literary works. In the west, Dante has long pointed out that literature has four meanings-literal meaning, figurative meaning, moral meaning and mysterious meaning. It can be seen that a truly successful literary work should not be definite and complete in meaning, but implicit in meaning to satisfy readers' desire for interpretation. As a branch of literature, children's literature certainly pays attention to the meaning of literature. Many children's literature works, especially children's novels suitable for teenagers, are inherent in a specific novel discourse system, which seems to have unlimited possibilities for generation and interpretation. For example, Cao Wenxuan's "Old Castle" describes the process of two teenagers looking for a legendary old castle on the surface, and tells children deeply that they should show the spirit of exploration without superstition, blind obedience, fear of difficulties and obstacles, and fear of predecessors in all the practices of understanding nature and society. The implication of children's literature texts exudes endless artistic charm, calling on children to fully mobilize their association and imagination and gradually enter the implication level of children's literature texts.
Reading expectation includes the cultivation of imagination. Yao Si, a representative figure of reception aesthetics, once said in Reception Aesthetics and Reception Theory: "Before and during the reading of literature, readers, as the subject of reception, often have established psychological structures due to complex personal and social reasons. The psychological schema on which the reader's established reading text is based is called the horizon of reading experience expectation, referred to as the horizon of expectation. " [9] In a sense, the apperception background of literary readers is composed of literary ability and reading interest, and it is the horizon of reading expectation. It is based on this apperception background that readers choose works, decipher symbols and talk to writers. Here, readers are the main body, active, active and creative. In other words, in the face of children's literature texts, children readers can and must use their imagination to concretize and re-create. If we use Hans Robert Jauss's words again, it is: "Literary works are not a comfortable object with the same appearance for every observer in every era. It is not a monument to announce its transcendental nature to itself, but like a band's music score, always waiting for the ever-changing response from reading activities. Only reading activities can save the work from the dead language materials and give it realistic life. " [10] These viewpoints of reception aesthetics actually emphasize the re-creation nature of children's literature reading. When reading a work, children's understanding of the work is not superficial, but on the basis of reading (or listening to reading), they use artistic thinking and creative imagination and association to feel and understand the "emotion" and "reason" of the work. Therefore, children's literature reading has obvious emotional and rational colors, and has the characteristics of initiative and creativity. Moreover, children's psychology has its own characteristics: they show great enthusiasm for novelty. "Teenagers are the most imaginative. Their spatial imagination is constantly improving and their imagination is more creative." [1 1] Therefore, in the face of Cao Wenxuan's children's novels, children are waiting for a unique child image and picturesque environment in imagination; In the face of Tang Sulan's fairy tales, children wait for twists and turns and interesting plots and humorous fairy tale images in imagination; In the face of children's poetry, children are waiting for harmonious rhythm and distinct rhythm in the middle of imagination. Therefore, in children's reading expectation, we should grasp the characteristics of children's rich imagination, so as to further cultivate their association and imagination.
Reading aftertaste contains the cultivation of imagination. Aftertaste is a form of mental rumination and a retrospective psychological activity. (3) (17 1) A plot in children's literature, a typical character of a character, even an interesting sentence or two in children's poetry, a certain artistic conception, a good sentence and a keyword may leave children readers with a reading aftertaste. The reason for reading aftertaste is that children's abstract thinking ability is not developed enough, and they may suddenly understand the feelings of scenes, plots, characters and connotations in the works for a while, which needs to be rearranged and gradually understood in the process of reviewing the works. In the process of aftertaste, teachers can make full use of various methods and means to effectively stimulate children's emotions, so that children can draw imagination under the touch of emotions, and then produce more emotional experiences in flying imagination. For example, when recalling the article "Race against Time", let children use their imagination to associate proverbs related to cherishing time on the basis of further understanding "Time flies like an arrow, the sun and the moon fly like a shuttle"; You can also use music to create teaching situations, so that students can expand their imagination and tell short stories that cherish time; Or ask students to paint a picture of cherishing time with a brush. This process uses stories, music or pictures to render the atmosphere and create a relaxed and free classroom atmosphere, which is often full of passion, imagination and inspiration. It not only helps to enrich children's inner emotional world, cultivate their imagination, and make children realize the emotional beauty and image beauty of literature, but also directly relates to children's understanding and acceptance of literature itself. At the same time, this process also encourages students to express their independent opinions, gradually cultivates students' ability of inquiry reading and creative reading, and advocates multi-angle and creative reading … to expand students' thinking space and improve reading quality.
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