Imitation and creativity in school essays

Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of representation of the imitation processes and productive activities in school essays. The prerequisites for the study are approaches to the analysis of school essays as a type of creative work, which reflects one or another degree of imitative communicative activity of a person, as well as the relevance of the problems of determining the features of the integration of reproductive and productive activities in communication, the representation of the creativity of a linguistic personality in the text. Solving these problems allows us to determine the ways of actualizing the creative component of preparation for essays and translating it from a potential state into a real one. The purpose of the study is to determine the conditions for the realization and indicators of the reproductive and productive components in the communicative activities of the author of the essay and the conditions for the dynamics of their communicative state. The following methods were used content analysis, communicative and structural/semantic analysis of essays, analysis of linguistic marking of the processes of imitation and creativity in texts. For the first time, the paper reviews the awareness of the communicative intention and genre characteristics of the sample as the leading condition for the implementation of imitation and creativity in school essays, describes the indicators of the dynamics of the communicative state from the state of imitation to the state of creativity, which are correlated with creative abilities: the multiplicity, diversity, and consistency of micro themes (indicators of thinking flexibility), the balance of the boundaries of the author’s intention (an indicator of the ability to see the essence of the problem, the subject of speech), the transformation of speech cliches (an indicator of the ability to resist stereotypes). The authors also propose a typology of reproductive, reproductive/productive, and productive communication skills of school students: the ability to copy the genre frame, interpret the sources of the author’s intention, correct the system of structural and semantic components of the text of the essay.