Special issue of Chinese childhood
New discovery
New developmentl
New changes in children's literature
If children's literature is like a garden full of spring, then children's literature for young children must be the first to bloom. With the updating of the concept of writing and publishing, our understanding of children's literature and its importance as a "prefix stage" of reading are attracting more and more attention and academic discussion.
What are the new trends in children's literature in recent years?
Why do you think of picture books when you mention this category?
Why are adult writers less involved in children's literature?
Is "writing for the child of your heart" still valid here?
In the age of images, how to call for a return to paper reading?
In the face of practicality and "early childhood connection", what is children's literature?
……
In this special issue of Chinese Childhood, we invite four writers, publishers, and critics who have been working in the field of early childhood literature for a long time to discuss various issues in the development of early childhood literature.
Children's literature as "big literature".
Interviewee
Jin Bo (well-known children's literature writer)
Bai Bing (Children's Literature Writer, Editor-in-Chief of Relay Publishing House)
Du Chuankun (Children's Literature Critic, Professor, Faculty of Education, Shandong Normal University)
Zhao Xia (Children's Literature Writer and Critic, Associate Professor, School of Education, Zhejiang University of Foreign Chinese)
Interviewer
Reporter Zhang Yingying
"Segmentation" and the ever-expanding creation and publication of children's literature
Q
What are the new changes in the creation and publication of children's literature in recent years?
Bai Bing: First of all, on the whole, the development of original children's literature is getting better and better. In terms of categories, children's songs, children's stories, children's fairy tales, picture books and other books in various categories are continuing to make efforts. In recent years, the fastest development of original children's literature in China has been fairy tales and picture books for young children. Some people think that the decline in the birth rate will affect the publication of children's literature, but now it seems that the impact is not very large, and the overall variety and sales of children's literature have not fluctuated greatly compared with previous years.
Another change is that from the perspective of the creation and publication of children's literature, the tendency of segmentation is becoming more and more obvious. Originally, publications for 0-6 years old were called children's literature, but now they are subdivided into 0-3 years old for baby literature, 4-6 years old for children's literature, and creators also consciously create for 0-3 year old children. These baby picture books are simple in language, rhythmic, and easy to identify and remember, making them suitable for parents and children to read together. Such a segmentation has also brought more readers to children's literature.
In addition, there are more and more writers and rookies engaged in the creation of children's literature, and their influence at home and abroad is increasing. Some writers who originally wrote children's literature joined the creation of children's literature, such as Xue Weimin, who wrote "Twenty-four Solar Terms" for young children. Among the winning works of the Relay Cup Jinbo Children's Literature Award, 20 works have been exported to 19 countries and regions, and have been influential at home and abroad, such as Han Xu's "Mr. Octopus Sells Umbrellas" Korean version has sold more than 23,000 copies and has become a Korean bestseller.
The inside page of "Mr. Octopus Sells Umbrellas".
From the perspective of output, children's literature of higher ages may have differences in culture, life background and translation understanding, while the output of children's literature is more common in childlike interest and has a higher acceptance overseas because of "childlike innocence without borders". On the whole, there are more and more varieties of Chinese children's literature, which has had an increasing impact.
Du Chuankun: In recent years, the creation and publication of children's literature has developed more consciously. First, we must constantly break through the shackles of the concept of "education." Promote the spirit of childhood games, reflect the love and respect for childhood, and the enlightenment of children's truth, goodness and beauty is contained in literary expression. The second is the expansion of themes and themes. Philosophical enlightenment, life education, war and death, ecological care and other topics have entered the territory of children's literature with a variety of art forms and narrative techniques, with grand propositions, rich meanings, and broad visions, presenting the atmosphere of "great literature". Third, picture books have become the new favorite of children's literature, or the "picture book" of children's literature. Picture books, which combine pictures and texts or rely entirely on pictures to narrate, have set off a new boom in creation and publishing, and have also become a common form of reading for young children.
There are many reasons for these changes. First of all, it is the result of the continuous development of children's literature at the theoretical and practical levels. As the result of the gradual differentiation of children's literature, children's literature not only maintains a certain "commonality" with children's literature, but also recognizes its "heterogeneity". As Mr. Jin Bo said, "In my opinion, one of the signs of literary progress is the prosperity of children's literature, and one of the signs of the progress of children's literature is the prosperity of children's literature." This has been proven by the facts of many countries around the world. "The prosperity of children's literature has promoted the maturation of children's literature and art. Secondly, thanks to the gradual formation of the discipline of early childhood literature. The theoretical construction of children's literature, the combing of literary history, the criticism of writers' works, the establishment of children's literature awards, and reading promotion activities have formed a good interaction with creation and publishing. In addition, the emphasis on early reading in the field of preschool education has made children's literature, especially picture books, a must-have. Early reading is regarded as the foundation of lifelong learning, predicts future reading ability and academic achievement, and has the emotional value that young children need.
Zhao Xia: In recent years, there have been two striking trends in the creation and publication of children's literature: first, the creation and expansion of children's picture books and artistic exploration have become more and more eye-catching; second, in addition to the richness and diversity of content, the illustrations and binding of various children's literature books have also tended to become more and more exquisite. This is a typical embodiment of the new mature stage of development of contemporary children's literature, and the main reasons behind it are the explosive development of original picture books in recent years, which has led to the development of children's picture books as the main components of picture books. Second, the continuous expansion of people's cognition of children's books and the general emphasis on children's reading life have promoted the continuous improvement of the quality of children's book creation and publication. In recent years, children's reading has attracted more and more attention in the life of children's families and kindergartens, and the willingness and capital of families, schools, and communities in this regard have been significantly enhanced, and children's literature books directly related to this are also experiencing a new stage of development.
Q
Someone once mentioned that Chinese children's literature is climbing from high to low, and the lower the age group, the more difficult it is to write.
Jin Bo: Children's literature is the literature of enlightenment, which is strictly restricted by the age, psychological and aesthetic characteristics of children. The difficulties of creating children's literature can only be truly felt after you have started to write. A short toddler story or toddler poem requires a lot of skill. From this point of view, we can even say that children's literature is literature among children's literature. The younger you are, the more you pay attention to. Children's literature is the most interesting. Children's interest is multifaceted, is subtle, its material, its narrative, its perception of children's hearing, visual, all need corresponding conditions. Therefore, the ease of listening (musicality) and the ease of viewing (picture sense) of children's literature should be expressed in language. A seemingly simple story, a nursery rhyme, children are so obsessed with reading (listening), there must be a reason for this. This truth must be analyzed and studied in depth, and it is difficult to create kindergarten literature without this effort. So Leo Tolstoy once said: I want to try to write something for children. I die without regrets.
Children's literature is big literature, and it is not easy to write shallowly.
"Cold Thinking" Brought about by the Picture Book Boom
Q
When talking about children's literature, we often think of picture books, and the most common picture books on the market are also picture books. Will the strength of this genre cause some suppression to other types of children's literature?
Jin Bo: Picture books are the focus of reading at a certain stage in the reading process of young children, but they cannot replace other types of books. Picture books are not a substitute for books of other varieties. Picture books are intuitive and appeal to young readers with color. It allows young children to enjoy the joy of discovery. Color is the most popular way of aesthetics. But as children grow older, so do the variety of books they read. The reason why word books cannot be replaced by picture books is because the reading of written language is the art of imagination. Language cultivates our ability to recreate in the imagination. It is very important to develop children's language sense from an early age. This ability allows children to learn to express themselves and exercise their thinking skills. Reading should follow the sequence of picture books-bridge books-word books. Therefore, children's reading should be developed in an all-round way. When they reach the age of independent reading, if they still focus on picture book reading, it will affect the development of children's language expression and thinking skills. Here I would like to add that picture books are not the same as children's books, as a comprehensive art, picture books are diverse, and there are also picture books suitable for adults to read.
Bai Bing: Not really. The advent of the era of picture reading has indeed brought picture books to a new development opportunity, making them stand out in children's literature. We began to create picture books in the narrow sense at the turn of the century, and the progress of picture books in the past 20 years has been relatively fast, and the demand of parents is relatively large, but in fact, the creation and publication of children's fairy tales, children's stories, and children's essays are all new works and new people. For example, the children's prose of Guangdong writer Mu Ye has received a good response from the market.
As far as I know, several publishing houses have recently published a batch of children's prose collections, excellent children's essays are suitable for parents and children to read, and can also help children experience the beauty of the rhythm and rhythm of their mother tongue, so that children can improve their language use ability in reading.
Du Chuankun: If you think of picture books when you talk about children's literature, picture books are also the main ones on the market, which shows that picture books have become "synonymous" for children's literature to a large extent from concept cognition to creation and publication. This is undoubtedly a narrowing of children's literature. Children's literature includes both picture books with pictures and texts, as well as pure text works without pictures, and if one group is dominant, it will inevitably destroy the ecology of children's literature and lead to the one-sidedness of children's reading.
To change this situation, we need to have a correct understanding of the relationship between children's literature, picture books and children's reading. Because of its intuitive pictures and relatively few words, picture books are considered to be in line with children's specific image thinking, and are the main content of parent-child reading, as well as an important curriculum resource for kindergartens. However, even if picture books have integrated the audio-visual of "reading pictures and listening to words", they still cannot replace the audio-visual appreciation of text-only listening. Because listening by the ear can not only get closer to the essence of language, obtain a pleasant language experience from it, and develop language ability, but also the listening appreciation of pure text is a temporal, linear and coherent reading, which is not the same as the "listening" in the combination of audio-visual. Due to the integration of "vision", the latter needs to take into account the spatial reading of pictures, and the two are different in terms of attention maintenance, imagination arousal, and logical thinking cultivation, and cannot be substituted for each other. At the same time, the appreciation of text-only listening also means that what children can't understand may not be understood, which helps children get a richer and more challenging book list, so as to avoid missing out on many excellent and classic text-only children's literature at home and abroad.
Secondly, children's literature itself should also improve the quality of "all categories" of creation, especially the artistic quality of text-only works. Writers should fully understand and be in awe of the difficulty of creating children's literature, a "limited" literary genre, because children's knowledge and experience, language, comprehension, and unique emotional and spiritual characteristics all determine that writers cannot let go of themselves in their choice of content and form, and at the same time, the memories of individual children are basically gone, and they cannot provide more experience references in early childhood, which may also be one of the reasons why few adult literature writers are involved in the creation of children's literature. At the same time, with the help of platforms such as the "Jinbo Children's Literature Award" and the Seminar on the Theory of Chinese Original Children's Literature, to enhance the attention of children's literature and strengthen the benign interaction between theory, creation and publication, are all possible ways to reverse the ecological imbalance of "picture booking" of children's literature.
Zhao Xia: I don't think so. Picture books account for the largest proportion of children's literature. Image reading is the starting point of children's reading, and throughout early childhood, from the perspective of the broad concept of picture books, almost all children's books inevitably use the form of picture books. At the same time, picture books are not contradictory to children's songs, children's poems, children's fairy tales, children's life stories and other categories, and any genre of children's literature can be presented in the form of picture books (and often used). This is not a repression, but a positive response to young children's special reading tastes, ways, etc. Picture books and various traditional genres of children's literature can coexist and flourish together.
Among the children's picture books, there is a type of work that typically embodies the artistic characteristics of modern picture books, that is, children's picture books in which words and pictures tell a story together in a close, organic and ingenious cooperation. This kind of picture book is the most typical presentation and proof of the uniqueness of picture book art, and its value is irreplaceable. In the current original children's picture books, the proportion of such works is actually not very high. At the same time, I also believe that the original artistic exploration of this kind of picture book in recent years has greatly expanded people's understanding and expectations of children's literary and artistic expression ability and quality.
The development of contemporary children's picture books may bring about another problem worth considering, that is, the traditional genre classification of children's literature cannot simply cover children's picture books. At present, theoretical works on children's literature often juxtapose picture books with nursery rhymes, children's poems, children's fairy tales, children's prose, children's life stories, etc. I also use this classification in my book Poetics of Early Childhood: The Art World of Early Childhood Literature. However, even if the scope of children's picture books is limited to story works, it is still closely intertwined with children's fairy tales, children's essays, and children's life stories. Strictly speaking, children's picture books are not a genre that is completely juxtaposed with other traditional genres of children's literature. How to understand its identity and nature as a typical style of contemporary children's literature calls for more theoretical analysis and exploration.
Excellent children's literature is also written for the "child of the heart"
Q
At present, adult writers have formed a certain scale of children's literature and released many excellent works, but few adult literature writers have set foot in children's literature, what do you think is the reason?
Kimbo: We often quote Belinsky as saying that children's writers are born, not made. It may be a nature to be close to children, but to use the method of artistic creation to get close to children and infect children, we also need more natural childlike cultivation. Young children's expressions and aesthetic tastes are unique and different from other age groups in childhood. Adult literature writers are rarely involved in the creation of children's literature, first of all, because they do not pay enough attention to children's growth laws and unique aesthetic interests, lack of creative skills in children's literature, and lack of experience accumulated in interacting with children and sensitive capture of hot spots. Young children are a unique growth group, and the understanding and artistic expression of this group need more psychological preparation.
Zhao Xia: Children's literature is more complex depending on the age of the reader. Generally speaking, the older the age of the children's readers, the more similar the children's literature is to general literature. For example, young adult literature in children's literature is actually similar to adult literature in many ways. On the contrary, the younger the age of children's readers, such as children's literature and even infant literature, the more unique its style, subject matter, and language are. For adult literature writers, there are too many aspects that need to be adjusted and changed to get involved in the creation of children's literature, and the span and difficulty of writing are very large. There is also a phenomenon of children's literature by adult writers being adapted into picture books that can be read by young children. I believe that with the expansion of cross-border creation of children's literature, children's literature will also arouse the active interest of some adult literature writers.
Q
When many writers write children's literature, they will mention that they are not actually writing for children, but for themselves, or for the children in their hearts, is this also true for children's literature?
Zhao Xia: Due to the huge gap between adult writers and young readers in terms of concepts, feelings, consciousness, culture, etc., correspondingly, in the field of children's literature, the awareness of young readers is particularly important. If the creation of a kind of children's literature is only based on self-expression, without fully considering the receptivity characteristics of young children's readers, it may not constitute much of an obstacle to the acceptance of older children's readers, but it may not be feasible for young children's reading at all. In my opinion, good children's literature is written not only for young readers, but also for the children in their hearts. An excellent writer of children's literature often has some innate talent and temperament that is close to his or her childhood, and while he (she) writes for children, he or she is also sincerely and deeply understanding and telling about the child in his heart. Without this "child at heart", I very much doubt that a writer would be able to write truly good children's literature.
Jin Bo: Any literary creation needs to be written with enthusiasm and emotion. I am reminded of the Spanish writer Jimenez who said in the preface to his book "Little Silver and Me", "I have never written, and will not write a book for children", but this book was chosen as a textbook for primary and secondary schools in all Spanish-speaking countries. This proves that when writing children's literature, it is important to have children and childhood in your heart. Such a work may be suitable for all ages. "Write for yourself", or "write for the child in your heart", can also be literature for young children. Of course, as literature for young children, the text should be simple, interesting, and catchy to read. Also, it can stay in their memories, grow with them, and gradually deepen their understanding. Children's literature can also be read and updated often. I think that discussing this issue is a good proof that there is a wide range of artistic styles in the creation of children's literature, including children's literature.
Illustration of "Little Silver and Me".
In the age of images, it is necessary to help children return from passive acceptance to active thinking
Q
For urban children today, the media and sources available are becoming more and more abundant, where is the uniqueness and irreplaceability of children's literature?
Jin Bo: Urban children have more opportunities to enjoy a wealth of media and sources. Young children seem to be gifted in using and mastering these skills. They use early and learn fast. However, it can be said that the convenience and pleasure brought by all science and technology cannot replace reading. Even games are not a substitute for reading. The method of reading children's literature is mainly parent-child reading. Reading is incomplete without parent-child co-reading. Everything you do in early childhood must be infiltrated by family affection. Activities with family affection and bringing inner pleasure are cultivating imagination and emotional satisfaction, so children's literature is the nutrition of children's feelings. Since childhood, I have the sensitive ability to feel literature, which is the sunshine in the hearts of children.
Bai Bing: No matter how many information channels and platforms children face, the unique beauty of emotion, details, imagery and language in children's literature cannot be replaced by any other video game or online platform information. When we read children's literature, it provides children with a lot of imagination space, children can imagine, create, and even connect words and pictures, so as to form their own unique understanding of the work, and the reading of children's literature is creative and imaginative active thinking. At the same time, watching animations, videos and other viewing behaviors is a kind of passive thinking, children can run along with the story and follow the image, but it does not leave you any room for thinking and imagination.
The most important thing is that the language of children's literature is very unique, it is a beautiful language with a dewdrop-like original, full of colors and sounds, and the unfolding of these colorful languages and sounds in the mind is very important for children's language enlightenment. So let's not worry about the ocean of information sweeping, children's literature has its value and significance, which cannot be replaced by other things.
Zhao Xia: We should fully see the tremendous expansion of contemporary children's information life, and see their interest and enthusiasm for new media, but it is precisely because of this that the value of literary reading is irreplaceable. So far, we don't know much about what children can get out of reading. There have been many well-known cases of reading therapy throughout history that may not be scientifically explained, but they do offer a lesson in the fact that the act of reading seems to be deeply linked to many aspects of human intelligence. We talk about these examples in our book, Reading Is the Most Beautiful Gift – A Guide to Reading for Kids Ages 0-6, and argue that "reading is an activity that triggers, motivates and promotes multiple intelligences, and early reading is especially true of it" and "in a way, it is a way for children to shape and create themselves". Excellent children's literature provides important and high-quality materials for early childhood reading, it brings children literary experience and imagination aesthetic pleasure, it cultivates a patient, deep, stable way of thinking and emotion, it can also teach children to find and confirm their proper position in the world, time and space, and life in the subtle influence of literature.
Q
Some scholars have also proposed that if we want to become an excellent literary style, the creation of children's literature must first step out of the constraints of pragmatism in life and move towards literary stories in the real sense.
Jin Bo: Early childhood literature is for preschool children and early primary school students, and the selection of materials will be more open and nuanced. We often say that "children's literature is more knowledgeable, and children's books are more literary", which shows that children's literature does have its practical value. However, this practical value should be hidden, integrated into vivid images, and expressed in beautiful and musical language. The age characteristics of children's literature determine the interest of cognition and the principle of moral edutainment. In short, children's literature should cultivate children's ability to feel images, retell stories, and read aloud language, and transform the process of reading literary works into a process of exercising the sense of beauty. Let children have more ability to feel beauty in reading, and do not let children immediately "understand" any moral truths. When children read literature, they should inspire their aesthetic feelings more and ask them less to have immediate perceptions.
Break the myth about the "young connection".
Q
Compared with the lower stage, 5-6 year old children's literature is very rich and diverse, and there is a category of works and studies that have attracted more attention at present, focusing on the preparation of "early childhood transition" at this stage. Is there a misunderstanding in this?
Bai Bing: The reading materials at this stage are divided into two categories, one is pure children's literature in the strict sense, such as children's fairy tales, prose, nursery rhymes, stories, etc., and the other is popular science books with cognitive enlightenment, which also have literary elements, but are more for children to prepare for preschool knowledge.
When we measure whether a book is an excellent work of children's literature, it is still based on literary and children's nature. Of course, sometimes we will encounter children's literature created by writers, and in order to increase the functionality and practical value of children's books, publishers will add some additional knowledge content of big language to the editing homework. However, the beauty of art, literature, and childlike innocence has always been the most important essential feature of children's literature.
The significance of children's reading is not how much knowledge children learn, but the important thing is to resonate with children with emotions, images and stories, and help children build a healthy emotional world and personality world. For young children, interesting and playful children's literature can make children fall in love with reading and develop good reading habits, which is the most important function of children's literature book reading.
Zhao Xia: "The connection between young and primary" itself is a concept full of good concern. Going from kindergarten to elementary school means some kind of major change in life for a child. So that this transformation is not a broken mutation, but a natural "connection", in this process, children's books can do a lot. Children's literature should be committed to expanding and deepening people's understanding of "early childhood connection", and be wary of narrowly understanding "early childhood connection" as simple and excessive knowledge early education, but should use the unique language, narration and emotional power of children's literature to lead children to a broader life vision, interest and enthusiasm. Let children feel that on the way from kindergarten to primary school, the world is lovely, life is interesting, and growing up is to start from a more charming scenery step by step, in this process, we often need to overcome new difficulties, but also will harvest new fulfillment and sweetness. This is the best "young connection".
Du Chuankun: "Kindergarten and primary school connection" is an important issue faced by kindergartens and lower primary schools in recent years, including the "school preparation" of kindergartens and the "school adaptation" of lower primary schools. The logical premise of "cohesion" is that there is a "fracture", and the concept of "bridge book" is probably closely related to this in children's literature.
Leaving aside the differences between kindergarten and primary school in terms of curriculum content and methods, we should first ask the following questions: Is there really an inevitable "break" that needs to be connected? I don't think that a certain stage of literary reading is "preparation" for another stage, or its value lies in "preparing for another stage". Just as children are not "prepared" for adults, each stage of reading has its own independent value, and reading is also a personalized and continuous process. Its "rupture" may be more reflected in the carrier and form of reading, such as from picture books to text-only books (there are bridge books with gradually decreasing pictures and gradually increasing texts, and often equipped with pinyin), from parent-child, teacher-child reading to independent reading. But such a "rupture" is not a matter of course and inevitable.
Picture books are not only suitable for young children to read, but can still be read in primary school, and text-only books are not only suitable for independent reading above the middle grade of primary school, but also suitable for "listening and appreciating" in early childhood. When they are in the transition zone between the young and the primary, if they do not cancel the co-reading all at once, instead of letting the children read the pure text works by themselves, but with the increase of the children's literacy and the improvement of their reading comprehension ability, they will naturally enter the stage of being able to read the pure text books independently, and there will be no "break", and the teachers do not need to be overly anxious about the "connection".
New Media Editor: Zhang Yingying
Pictured: Photo.com
i: iwenxuebao
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