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In the late Qing Dynasty, religious periodicals by Western missionaries were made legal in China, and subsequently became an important manner of their missionary cause. Among them, Child's Paper 小孩月报 (1875–1881) by John Marshall Willoughby Farnham, a Protestant missionary from the United States, endeavoured to convert child readers by carrying children's stories of moral and emotional education. By concentrating on the educational elements of Child's Paper, this article inspects how conversion was achieved via the intertextual interpretation of Christian doctrines within these educational elements. Specifically, how the image of little Christians and urchins, respectively, represents salvation and redemption in Christian morals. This article holds that the missionaries' stress on the authority of Christian discourse in the education of Chinese children makes evident an increasing emphasis on the reformative effects of Christianity on Chinese children. Moreover, the conversion-education efforts by missionaries also construed helping Chinese children gain a cross-cultural perspective on Western religion, and arguably inspired later Chinese intellectuals' to create newspapers for the purpose of the pre-primary education of Chinese children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children's learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies reported in 30 articles (n = 1,812 children) and compared children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to medium (reading on paper versus on-screen), design enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and adult support for children aged between 1 and 8 years. The comparison of digital versus paper books that only differed by digitization showed lower comprehension scores for digital books. Adults' mediation during print books' reading was more effective than the enhancements in digital books read by children independently. However, with story-congruent enhancements, digital books outperformed paper books. An embedded dictionary had no or negative effect on children's story comprehension but positively affected children's vocabulary learning. Findings are discussed in relation to the cognitive load theory and practical design implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presented investigates the understanding of feminist literature by preschool children in a Spanish school. To carry out the research, semi-structured interviews with 65 students were performed, in order to discuss the story, The Paper Bag Princess. The data analysis was conducted under a poststructuralist lens, using the cultural matrix of gender as a tool for analysis. This document collects the results obtained from the following categories of analysis: emphasis on female beauty, discourse of romantic love, comparison with traditional stories (category maintenance work) and alternative discourses of femininity. The findings of the study indicate that boys and girls use two different strategies when coming in contact with feminist tales: comparing the feminist story to the, hitherto, considered 'correct' or natural order and correcting every element that challenged the structures of the cultural matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine's representations of the hardships and difficulties that refugee children encounter as they flee their homelands, sometimes as unaccompanied minors. Set on the Greek island of Lesbos during the 2015–2016 refugee crisis, Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021) depicts the sufferings of refugee children, and simultaneously draws on mythological events to underline their miseries and anguishes in contemporary times. By juxtaposing contemporary stories of refugee children with those of children and young people from classical literature, such as Icarus and Arion, Alameddine's narrative attempts to document these stories and save them from oblivion. As the narrator, Dr Mina Simpson, relates the events she witnesses during her sojourn in Lesbos, she becomes aware of her position as a person who once went through similar experiences of deprivation and dislocation. In this sense, The Wrong End of the Telescope critiques and exposes anti-immigration policies implemented by European countries to curb the influx of immigrants and asylum-seekers from the Middle East. Employing a postcolonial perspective, this paper highlights how Alameddine's novel links the contemporary refugee crisis to Europe's colonial past and shows how the Mediterranean has become a cemetery for children and young people who aspire to better living conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A persistent problem in teaching introductory statistics has been helping students overcome their fears and the abstract nature of what they need to learn. Students' own contextualised stories are argued to present an opportunity for humanising the abstract, helping reduce student fears to complement traditional teaching approaches. This paper applies Bruner (Actual minds, possible worlds, Harvard University Press, 1986) theoretical perspectives on narrative mode of thought to understand how students' own contextualised stories might support them in making sense of university introductory statistics. An exploratory, design research study was undertaken where 31 student participants were interviewed across a two-year period. All participants had completed an introductory statistics course where they wrote contextualised children's stories about normal distributions and sampling distributions of the mean. Using an assumption-based, conjecture-driven, reflective analysis, participant interview data was analysed to generate preliminary research findings. Two preliminary findings are detailed in this paper. One revealed that participants initially don't seem to naturally make connections with statistics using their own stories, while another showed that once they did so, their stories helped initiate pathways of access for making sense of their statistical learning. To test the preliminary findings, Bruner (Actual minds, possible worlds, Harvard University Press, 1986) theoretical perspectives on narrative mode of thought—presupposition, subjectification, and multiple perspectives—were used to develop an analytical tool. The methodology in the study provides new insights for understanding how students' own contextualised stories might help them make sense of their learning. The implications of the study are relevant for statistics education, particularly in the areas of statistical thinking processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on children's literature focuses on preschool children's books (children aged 3–6) and on juvenile fiction, yet is lacking in studies on toddler books (ages 0–3). In this paper, I present a definition of the genre of toddler books (often referred to as boardbooks, despite it including non-boardbooks), while focusing on the illustrational aspects, that are at least as dominant as the written texts, if not more so. I also examine the plots and themes that are presented in toddlers' books, distinguishing between concept books (lexical books with no narrative), ritual books (which engage in instilling certain habits), and narrative books (toddlers' books that depict a complex narrative and serve as preparation for prereader books). The findings of the study indicate that toddlers' books are often infants' first encounter with both narrative thought and visual art, hence their significant place in their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in an age of artificial intelligence (AI). Open AI, an American artificial intelligence organization, claims that generative chatbots are here to stay. Although computer technology remains unevenly distributed, the presence of AI continues to be felt in many areas of daily life. Further, AI development happens in few countries whose cultural practices and beliefs tend to be embedded in AI output and functionality. Western and Global North perspectives tend to dominate conversations about AI. How might AI technology function equitably in an ethno‐racially and linguistically diverse world? This paper explores intersections of technology, coloniality, and bias to contextualize the user‐experience for individuals in groups characterized as high, medium, and low‐resourced languages. For whom does AI function in our globalizing world? Engaging with this question through a languacultural (Agar, 1994) lens, I employ a language and culture perspective to guide inquiry into AI’s output and impact, based on a children’s storybook. Specifically, I deploy Kenyan, Indonesian, and Taiwanese languacultural perspectives of three participants in a culturally cognizant reading (Washington, 2023) of a product of chatbot‐human composing, ‘Alice and Sparkle’, a children’s book illustrated by MidJourney and co‐authored by ChatGPT and Ammaar Reshi. Overall, through scrutiny of encoded cultural tropes and values inscribed within text and images, this paper proposes considerations for literacy pedagogy and research that stem from a pursuit of inclusive AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of word formation processes is considered to be the necessary prerequisite for the mastery of the morphology of the mother language as well as vocabulary development and vocabulary learning and teaching (Nagy et al., 2006; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Templeton, 1989). In addition, the acquisition of the morphological component of a language makes predictions regarding the acquisition of other linguistic components, such as the syntax and/or the semantics. The aim of this paper is to describe the main axes of a program of teaching the morphology of Greek through children's stories and the results of its implementation in class. The core of the program is a story accompanied by consolidation exercises. Aki-aros-itsa, the teaching program, was implemented to a) a group of 94 monolingual preschool children (age range: 5-6 years) who served as the experimental group and b) a group of 54 adults (age range 18-50 years) who served as the control group. The results of the implementation of the program underlined the fact that the experimental and control groups' scores improved with respect to the assimilation of derivational rules and principles after the teaching intervention. This entails that focused children's stories provide an effective and fast way of teaching the morphology of Greek L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, only 23 Queer literary works have been published for children and adolescents in Hebrew. This paper examines the characteristics of these works in light of the ambivalent and controversial status of the LGBTQ+ community in Israel. The findings show that the few works that have been published and that present same-sex families or LGBTQ+ characters, and the manner in which Queer themes are presented in those texts, are in line with how these issues are perceived and addressed by Israeli society. Moreover, this article divides the Queer Israeli literature for children and youth into three categories: implied Queer literature that hides the Queer existence through the allegoric genre; Queer-phobic literature that seemingly presents the Queer family but in actual fact promotes homophobic stereotypes; and Queer literature that places the LGBTQ+ character or family in the center of the story without passing judgment or criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several authors draw attention to implicit or explicit messages about the real world, aspects that we probably think less about when choosing a story to read to young children. Examples of behavioural antimodels can be easily captured by a competent pedagogue or parent in narrative writings such as fairy tales or stories belonging to well-known writers from the international and Romanian literature. The present study envisages a qualitative investigative approach, based on semi-structured interviews, aiming to explore parents' perceptions regarding the effect of preschoolers' exposure to stereotypes and verbal and behavioural aggression found in many of the traditional fairy tales and most circulated stories. The results of the study were compiled by investigating the responses of the 12 participants (N=12) based on three dimensions of analysis. Thus, a first dimension focused on the vision of the effects of aggression present in literary texts on children and the way to manage passages marked by violence. The second dimension sought to identify the opinion of the parents interviewed in relation to the possible consequences of the repeated exposure of children to clichés and stereotypes. The last unit of analysis aimed to picture the participants' beliefs regarding the need to harmonize the subjects of fairy tales and stories heard by preschoolers to the current lifestyle of today's society. The end of the paper includes a series of discussions with reference to the educational implications, limitations of the study and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We begin developing our relationship with and for Nature during childhood, and over the last 20 years research has advanced our understanding of human relationships with Nature. However, a focus on human-animal relationships dominates environmental understanding, including through the medium of literature, especially children's literature. It is critical that children know, engage with and care for plants at this time of climate crisis and this could be facilitated through climate literature. The popularity of children's climate fiction has increased dramatically in the last few years due to what publishers are calling the 'Greta Thunberg effect' – resulting in many more books now available that aim to empower young people to save the planet. However, in these texts, we argue that there is still an emphasis on animal and human consequences of climate change rather than on those of plants and the agency of plants (or lack thereof). We argue it is imperative that children understand not just the importance of human-animal relationships in regard to the climate crisis, but also the fundamental role of botanical life forms in preserving life on Earth. Taking three recently published children's books of fiction we consider how botanical encounters are represented in these texts, and how this can undermine the perceived environmental importance of plants and people's relationships with them. Informed by the recent work of Lykke Guanio-Uluru (2020), we consider the position plants play in these examples of contemporary children's climate literature and encourage a more critical consideration of the place of plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Hwang Sun-mi's The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children's story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her "baby," with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral virtues in the natural world. By leaving the human-organized society, the hen Sprout realizes her name's potential for vitality and growth. This paper explores cultural connections between the animal and nature in Hwang's story within a Korean context, inviting comparisons between Western and Eastern environmental perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a multi-layered cross-genre corpus, annotated for coreference resolution, causal relations, and temporal relations, comprising a variety of genres, from news articles and children's stories to Reddit posts. Our results reveal distinctive genre-specific characteristics at each layer of annotation, highlighting unique challenges for both annotators and machine learning models. Children's stories feature linear temporal structures and clear causal relations. In contrast, news articles employ non-linear temporal sequences with minimal use of explicit causal or conditional language and few first-person pronouns. Lastly, Reddit posts are author-centered explanations of ongoing situations, with occasional meta-textual reference. Our annotation schemes are adapted from existing work to better suit a broader range of text types. We argue that our multi-layered cross-genre corpus not only reveals genre-specific semantic characteristics but also indicates a rich contextual interplay between the various layers of semantic information. Our MLCG corpus is shared under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's literature or young adult literature is often seen as an elementary and casual genre, but people overlook the powerful tools it acquires in modelling attitudes and shaping children's minds. Various studies point out that society's behaviours and attitudes towards disability and people with disability are primarily based on popular culture and not personal encounters or experiences. Disability has always been an inseparable part of children's movies and stories from the beginning of times, only the magnitude to which it has been revealed has changed. This literature is seen as the most important as it introduces the world to young minds, and hence the impression it creates in children's minds would not easily be eliminated. It is also noted that young children accept differences and generate positive, acceptive attitudes during their early ages as they are less resistant and have little foreknowledge. This paper examines the disability representations in children's literature and traces the changes it has undergone as a genre from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Two children's books are selected for this study, "Heidi" by Johanna Spyri and "Rules" by Cynthia Lord. The differences in the portrayal of disability and disabled characters in these novels are studied through content analysis, character study, comparison and by analyzing the linguistic symbols. This paper also ventures to decipher the norms and societal values the stereotypes were based on, and it also attempts to account for any changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper aims to point out the possibilities of developing critical thinking in children by conducting bibliotherapy workshops in the library, based on the template of a traditional children's story. The work is based on a course, which the authors run at the Croatian Training Centre for Continuing Education of Librarians to encourage critical thinking in children, develop reading habits and create a critical reader. It is based on the workshops that were an integral part of the international project TRACE. Approach/methodology: The paper presents the workshops the authors conducted as part of the Erasmus+ project Traditional children's stories for a common future - TRACE. The workshops are shared with the librarians through the Croatian Training Centre for Continuing Education of Librarians. We encourage children to think and create their own opinions using different methods, most of which are based on the modernized Socratic method. Results: Children often do not get to express their opinions by questioning their attitudes. The conducted workshops showed how it is possible to use stories with different ethical themes to stimulate critical thinking in children and teach them how to be active participants in their society. Practical use: Considering the possibility of using/combining several methods and conducting workshops in "continuations", it is possible to apply them both in school libraries and children's departments of public libraries. Originality and value: The paper points to the importance of developing critical thinking in children and highlights the value of traditional stories that influence children's awareness of their personality and shaping of their attitudes, contributing to the ability to solve life's problems and the development of a value system and the improvement of interpersonal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to leverage the potential benefits of technology to speech and language therapy language assessment processes, large samples of naturalistic language data must be collected and analysed. These samples enable the development and testing of novel software applications with data relevant to their intended clinical application. However, the collection and analysis of such data can be costly and time-consuming. This paper describes the development of a novel application designed to elicit and analyse young children’s story retell narratives to provide metrics regarding the child’s use of grammatical structures (micro-structure) and story grammar (macro-structure elements). Key aspects for development were (1) methods to collect story retells, ensure accurate transcription and segmentation of utterances; (2) testing the reliability of the application to analyse micro-structure elements in children’s story retells and (3) development of an algorithm to analyse narrative macro-structure elements. Methods: A co-design process was used to design an app which would be used to gather story retell samples from children using mobile technology. A citizen science approach using mainstream marketing via online channels, the media and billboard ads was used to encourage participation from children across the United Kingdom. A stratified sampling framework was used to ensure a representative sample was obtained across age, gender and five bands of socioeconomic disadvantage using partial postcodes and the relevant indices of deprivation. Trained Research Associates (RA) completed transcription and micro and macro-structure analysis of the language samples. Methods to improve transcriptions produced by automated speech recognition were developed to enable reliable analysis. RA micro-structure analyses were compared to those generated by the digital application to test its reliability using intra-class correlation (ICC). RA macro-structure analyses were used to train an algorithm to produce macro-structure metrics. Finally, results from the macro-structure algorithm were compared against a subset of RA macro-structure analyses not used in training to test its reliability using ICC. Results: A total of 4,517 profiles were made in the app used in data collection and from these participants a final set of 599 were drawn which fulfilled the stratified sampling criteria. The story retells ranged from 35.66 s to 251.4 s in length and had word counts ranging from 37 to 496, with a mean of 148.29 words. ICC between the RA and application micro-structure analyses ranged from 0.213 to 1.0 with 41 out of a total of 44 comparisons reaching ‘good’ (0.70–0.90) or ‘excellent’ (>0.90) levels of reliability. ICC between the RA and application macro-structure features were completed for 85 samples not used in training the algorithm. ICC ranged from 0.5577 to 0.939 with 5 out of 7 metrics being ‘good’ or better. Conclusion: Work to date has demonstrated the potential of semi-automated transcription and linguistic analyses to provide reliable, detailed and informative narrative language analysis for young children and for the use of citizen science based approaches using mobile technologies to collect representative and informative research data. Clinical evaluation of this new app is ongoing, so we do not yet have data documenting its developmental or clinical sensitivity and specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1952 essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", C. S. Lewis discusses three approaches to writing children's literature and defends "that particular type of children's story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale" from the charge that it is "childish". In this paper, I define Christian apologetics as "the art and science of persuasively communicating and advocating Christian spirituality across spiritualties, through the responsible use of rhetoric, as being objectively beautiful, good and true/reasonable" and see how Lewis' advice about the rhetoric of children's stories can be generalized and applied to the discipline of Christian apologetics. In particular, many atheists charge Christian Spirituality with being childish. For example, British atheist Richard Dawkins says that religious people "have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking" (Dawkins, Scientific American). Describing his own childhood, Dawkins says: "I think I did believe it up to the age of eight or nine, when preachers said if you really, really pray for something it can happen. Even moving mountains, I believed it could really happen... I grew up. I put away childish things." (Dawkins, "Claims Fairy Tales Are Harmful To Children") In this paper I explore how the dialectical moves made by Lewis in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" can shape a rational response to such rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every story tells a main event from which minor events branch out, and both stories may narrate a single event; however, they differ completely in how they convey and structure the events artistically and technically. This is due to the narrative technique, which is the fundamental element and central technique in constructing any story. Narration is the process of transferring an event from its realistic form to its linguistic form, and it is the method chosen by the narrator or storyteller to present their events. Narration relies on a set of elements, including time, place, characters, and events. It also utilizes various techniques, such as exposition, description, and dialogue. Since narration is the backbone of the story and the basis for its construction and arrangement, it represents the author's creativity and uniqueness on one hand, and the source of differentiation between each story on the other hand. Therefore, in this research paper, we aim to uncover the narrative techniques in a number of children's and adult stories, highlighting the significant points of divergence and agreement between them, which often determine the story's target audience and purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is concerned with lexical pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening and their contributions to modified words meaning as well as various contextual factors affecting them in English children short stories. It basically aims to identify linguistic phenomena which their understanding requires lexical adjustment of linguistically encoded meaning, context and pragmatic expectations. In this regard, the data of the study comprises thirty extracts of the type (utterance-response) selected of five English short stories written for children aged (8-12 years old). They are retrieved from the English website: (Book trust. Get you read). Thus, the study hypothesizes that broadening cases are more commonly identified than narrowing ones in this genre. It also assumes that contextual factors affecting narrowing cases are different from those effecting broadening cases. To achieve its aim, based on relevance theoretic approach to lexical pragmatics, the present study develops a pragmatic model of lexical pragmatic processes which is intended to analyse these extracts taking into account different types of short stories. The findings statistically reveal significant differences in the number of the linguistic phenomena identified. Yet, no difference is recognized concerning contextual factors. The study, then, suggests that lexical pragmatic processes are important components of the effective interpretation of modified meanings in the targeted data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories in children's daily lives reflect collective meaning-making and knowledge creation with educators, children, and families. The stories sparked during these collective journeys unveil their shared early childhood experiences (Engel, 2005) and inherited cultural wisdom across generations. Education for sustainable development (ESD) has drawn global interest within the field of early childhood education. UNESCO (2005) defined ESD as a weaving of social, environmental, and economical dimensions for building a sustainable world. In this article, one Hong Kong based case story was selected from a study about children's storying conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand and Hong Kong to illustrate these dimensions. This Old-Newspapers story was situated in storied conversations (Gaffney et al., 2019) among children aged 4-5 in a local kindergarten. Children inquired about the wise use of paper through conversations, experimenting, and play. Old newspapers offered pedagogical resources and inspiration that contributed to children's understanding of environmental sustainability. Besides revealing the shared and co-created learning experiences about, in, and for the environment (Davis, 1998, 2009), this story revived hidden cultural heritage and intergenerational connections in families in the social dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several formats found in curriculum collections do not have representation as Library of Congress form subdivisions. There are form subdivisions that are appropriate for books, such as Juvenile fiction, Dictionaries, and Textbooks. However, form subdivision options are limited for formats such as audiovisuals, games, and kits. There may be appropriate topical subdivisions, but they cannot be used as form subdivisions. With terms adapted from Library of Congress Subject Headings, topical Free-floating Subdivisions, and references related to those vocabularies, this paper promotes increasing the availability of authorized form subdivisions for use in subject access points for curriculum materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Katherine Paterson's beloved children's story, Bridge to Terabithia (1977), explores the relationship of a young boy named Jess to his family, to his best friend Leslie, and to the nature of tragedy. Paterson demonstrates that learning to cope with senseless accidents is a part of growing up, but that learning to cope does not mean changing or losing our sense of identity. This paper, using a psychoanalytic Laingian approach to Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, reveals Jess' relationships to himself and to others and how his interactions and perceptions influence the development of these relationships. Laing's theory demonstrates that Jess' character development parallels that of an infant. The distinction of self and other leads to the formation of multiple personalities at various stages of development, and, in the case of lack of affirmation from others and/or from the self, these personalities may never develop to maturity-whether through abandonment, suppression, or abrupt changes in how one perceives and/or relates to others. Jess' self-protection tactics, such as dehumanization, prevent him from forming positive and lasting relationships, which in turn perpetuates his ontological insecurity. It is only Leslie's interventional friendship and mother-bond that gives him a foundation on which to build his identity. When the foundation is ripped away, his identity collapses, but Jess now has the tools he needs to rebuild himself without her. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of oral scary stories or strashilki is one of the most popular of the contemporary Russian children's subculture. Rooted both in traditional folklore and children's mythic thinking, these are tales about encounters with supernatural forces, objects, and things that usually end in the victim's death. This paper focuses on one particular category of strashilki's evil agents, namely vampires. The vampire of Russian children's scary stories possesses many of the attributes of the "general vampire" although the word itself did not appear in oral childlore until after the arrival of cable channels and video salons in the late 1980s. Special attention is paid to stories about cookies/meat pies prepared of people and tales about ominous stains. This group of strashilki is regarded here as vampiric stories as their malevolent protagonists employ known folk vampiric qualities. Several scary stories appearing on these pages are translated from Russian by the author of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]