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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 article offers information on the creativity of a teacher, who tells a story and asks the students to draw a magic genie and create a magic bouquet. According to the story, the teacher buys an old mysterious house that needed renovation. The teacher finds a magic genie bottle while cleaning the house. The teacher also finds some dirty flowers and tries to change the color of the flowers. The teacher becomes very happy with the change of color after washing them in the water. The teacher instructs the students to do several activities including to paint an empty bottle or jug that has a narrow neck fitted with a cork. He further instructs to wrap 4 grams of sodium iodide or potassium iodide in tissue paper. He instructs to prepare the magic bouquet by soaking a bunch of while silk flowers in different solutions including litmus, and phenol red.

This paper focused on teachers' personal stories to determine the pedagogical function and impact of children's literature. This study employed a life-story interview approach within a qualitative narrative inquiry methodology. The sample consisted of ten teachers from different branches. Participants were recruited using purposive sampling. Data were collected through interviews and analyzed using thematic and narrative structure approaches. The narrative structure consisted of three components: problem, activities, and denouement. Participants' life stories were thematically analyzed. The results show that teachers' observations and efforts help students recognize their problems. Teachers who associate their own stories with children's books lead to positive outcomes for themselves and their students. This experience helps students become aware of themselves and their problems and surrounding while helping teachers transform themselves individually and professionally. Therefore, children's books are pedagogically crucial for both students and teachers. This result shows that we should first raise educators' awareness of the pedagogical meaning and value of children's literature. Future narrative inquiries should focus on students' stories to determine the impact of children's literature on children. [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]

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]

How does literature for children portray homes lost and perhaps found? Does children's literature liberate or subjugate with these representations? What kinds of perspectives do the written and visual representations in children's narratives offer? How is the experience of subjugated childhoods represented in these narratives? How is the sense of self and sense of place, namely home, represented in both word and image? The literary representation of children is contingent upon preestablished notions of political formations and identity, namely the dynamics of the subjugated and subjugator. Employing theories from canonical critics in the field of postcolonial study, this paper looks at several children's narratives to explore the value of children's stories in representing home(lessness) from the perspective of child immigrants and refugees. It argues for the need to question whether these representations in children's narratives subjugate or liberate, considering how children's books can be seen as political acts. It argues that literature for children can be used as a tool of criticism to critique certain ideologies (and the existing social order and postcolonial ties). Considering the relationship between the individual and the state, it concludes by considering children's narratives as a way of configuring and even overturning the notion of home(lessness) and the significant question of whether a return to the homeland is ever possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The Story of Children's Television, from 1946 to Now' was an exhibition co-conceived by the authors and colleagues from the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, UK, running from 2015 to 2017 through a national tour. At the exhibition, objects from children's television history sat alongside screens showing the programmes to visitors. Our research explores how children's television culture operates as a site of memory and nostalgia, through which we can investigate forms of (inter)generational cultural memory. This paper explores the reconnections and disconnections that emerge in encounters with the material heritage of children's television in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been growing enthusiasm amongst those who undertake research with children, for the development of participatory and visual research methods. The greater availability and affordability of digital technology (such as digital cameras, tablets and smart phones) has meant that there has been greater scope for digital technology to support participatory research methods, or augment more traditional qualitative research methods. While digital technology provides new opportunities for qualitative researchers, they also come with a series of challenges – some of which have been grappled with by those using more traditional research methods but also some which are new. Our study was undertaken in Victoria, Australia, and used a combination of interviews, focus groups and digital storytelling to bring together two strands of work which have historically occurred separately: work with children experiencing domestic violence and programs for men who use domestic violence. While digital storytelling proved to be an effective method of engaging children and young people in the research, a range of challenging ethical issues emerged. Some of these issues were considered as part of the formal 'procedural ethics' process, but additional and more challenging issues relating to anonymity and the complex safety considerations of using of the children's digital stories within programs for men who use violence and dissemination emerged in practice. It is hoped that sharing our experiences and decision-making will contribute to the knowledge base for others considering engaging in sensitive research using digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates, identifies and analyses the use of fantasy by children's writers. Through the use of content analysis tool under the guidelines provided by Bormann's Fantasy Theme Theory, literary devices used by children's writers in relation to fantasy were identified and analysed. The theory stipulates that sharing of group fantasies creates symbolic convergence. Four tenets of the theory were used to analyse the structure and significance of fantasy in Nyambura Mpesha's children's stories which were published between the years 1997-2005. To achieve this, four selected Kiswahili short stories by the author were studied and analysed. Aspects of literature used by writers in the structuring of fantasy were spelt out. The data was analysed qualitatively. The study highlighted the elements of fantasy and showed how authors entertain and educate children through literary works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]