Children's Texts Research Articles

Explicative Specificity of the Concept of “Coronavirus” for Children in the Framework of Medical Discourse

Introduction. In the spring of 2020, the pandemic of coronavirus was announced in the world – the disease caused by the new type of coronavirus SARS-COV-2. In connection with the progressive psychoemotional stress in society in the literature and the media, attempts are made in a simple and affordable form to explain the causes of this disease and prevention methods. Despite the fact that the children's contingent was the least susceptible to the disease, this topic was widely covered in children's books, posters and brochures. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to analyze and study various methods of verbalizing the renewal of knowledge about coronavirus infection through lexical units. The article describes the results of the analysis of the concept of “coronavirus”, reflecting the “childish” vision of the disease.Methodology and sources. To create an idea of the concept of “Coronavirus”, it is required to conduct a framework analysis and build concepts of concepts that dominate generally in the discourse. For this, it is necessary to conduct a case analysis of children's texts, conceptual analysis and method of modeling using the theory of cognitive metaphor. Also, the compilation of frames will need to conduct definition, etymological, component and contextual analyzes.Results and discussion. Within the framework of this article, the role of metaphor as the main mechanism for representing information about the disease and its prevention is presented. As a result of the study, strategies for the verbalization of knowledge about coronavirus infection were revealed, contributing to training and socializationConclusion. The significance of the presented work is determined by the possibility of using the results of the study in theoretical and practical courses in cognitive linguistics, discourse theory, text linguistics and metaphorology. In addition, the results of the study can be used in theoretical and practical medical activity to optimize the connection in the field of pediatrics.

Teaching with Cuentos Combativos: Reading for Decolonial Futures

AbstractTransnational children's texts can bring communities together, forcing us to reflect critically on our past, present, and future, and pushing us to action. In this column, we propose that texts that do this form of activist work are cuentos combativos and that all teachers and researchers can leverage cuentos combativos for critical reflection, ReconoceR, and action for justice.

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

Abstract Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We use computational tools to characterize representation in children’s books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the past century and describe economic forces that may contribute to these patterns. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these tools, alongside text analysis methods, to measure skin color, race, gender, and age in the content of these books, documenting what has changed and what has endured over time. We find underrepresentation of Black and Latinx people in the most influential books, relative to their population shares, though representation of Black individuals increases over time. Females are also increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. Characters in these influential books have lighter average skin color than in other books, even after conditioning on race, and children are depicted with lighter skin color than adults on average. We present empirical analysis of related economic behavior to better understand the representation we find in these books. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities and that the types of children’s books purchased correlate with local political beliefs. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center nondominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities.

Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults:Moving Stories ed. by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian (review)

Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults:Moving Stories ed. by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian (review)

When the Shoe Doesn't Fit: Reading Cinderella as Colonial Children's Literature in the Philippines

Abstract: This essay explores how non-Anglophone versions of the Cinderella story are used to affirm or challenge certain colonial or imperial ideals that were carried by canonical Eurocentric children's texts circulated during the Golden Age of children's literature. Examining two specific Philippine versions of Cinderella that were initially produced during the American colonial period (1898-1946) in the Philippines demonstrates that children's literature—particularly texts imported by colonial educators as well as texts produced by local writers—was a site of contestation and creation. This analysis focuses on how these adaptations were used as a tool for colonial expansion and education, but at the same time, were adapted to suit the search for a Philippine national identity.

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jim�nez Garc�a (review)

Reviewed by: Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García Hilary Brewster (bio) Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture, by Marilisa Jiménez García. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García is a complex analysis of the historical, cultural, and artistic relationship between Puerto Rico and its mainland colonizer, the US. Her nuanced study examines authors, actors, playwrights, and librarians and the textual productions of these iconic Puerto Ricans—or Nuyoricans—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how each plays a role at the intersection of Puerto Rican and American youth cultures. Jiménez García expertly weaves history, politics, textual and media analysis, cultural critique, and scholarship to demonstrate their connectedness and transnational impact on one another. Although this connectedness is a result of complicated, often fraught and detrimental policies enacted by the United States lauding its colonial power over the people of the (now) territory of Puerto Rico, Jiménez García ultimately urges readers to celebrate the people whose stories are not only art and means of cultural expression but acts of resistance. In the introduction, Jiménez García lays out myriad frameworks as a precursor to the subsequent five chapters. In this rather dense beginning, she details how texts for youth and literacy programs for youth in Puerto Rico have a longstanding history with political protests on the archipelago (4), as well as how "literature for children" and other culture aimed at youth continues to have a seemingly negative standing in the academy, within pop culture, Latinx and Ethnic studies, and literature studies. Furthermore, she outlines the ways in which children's and youth literature is frequently coded as Anglo-British, white, and white [End Page 220] American in academic discourses (7); how picture books in particular play a role in replicating and upholding a racist, colonial hegemony; and also how children's literature has fallen out of the larger realm of Latin literary studies (12). Although Jiménez García notes that the relatively recent public attention to the need for "diverse" literature in the children's publishing world is ultimately positive, she also makes clear that this diversity generally overlooks authors, characters, and settings from Latin America and the Caribbean (16). Perhaps the most important point made in the introduction that becomes a recurring thread—even more than the others, given the nature of the cultural texts examined in the chapters—is that there has been a hesitancy to view the US as an empire, preferring an immigrant paradigm in locating difference rather than a settler colonial model regarding past and present land acquisition, occupation, removal, and continuous displacement of Indigenous populations. Particularly in the case of Latinxs, the dominant discourse lingers on issues of immigration and the border [rather than the US as an empire]. (14) This depiction of the US as "benevolent conqueror" has been a longstanding tradition in US K-12 classrooms (19). Jiménez García's critique of the US K-12 and higher education systems in upholding much of the aforementioned hegemony is perhaps the strongest section of the introduction, although also the thread that disappears most quickly in the other chapters. The first chapter centers two questions: what representations of Puerto Ricans occupied the bookshelves in the New York City public library from the late 1800s through 1960 (after the US invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 through Operation Bootstrap and the beginning of the establishment of the commonwealth in the 1950s), and how did the general US public learn about Puerto Rico and its people in children's texts? (30). Divided into two sections, this chapter is focused first on early primers and illustrated texts by white US writers, then shifts to discuss Puerto Rican writers responding to US imperialism (31). Drawing on scholars such as Nathalie op de Beeck and Lara Saguisag, Jiménez García argues that the "faux history books [primers especially] contain aspects one has come to expect...

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Reviewed by: Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture ed. by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Alicia Carroll (bio) Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier; pp. xiii + 264. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, $160.00, $44.05 ebook. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier's collection, Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, aims to reverse the problem of human exceptionalism that underplays the subjectivity and agency of animals. In many cases, the collection succeeds admirably. It is at its best when exploring the ontological intimacies between animals and children, noting the power of shared qualities—smallness, muteness, or perceived passivity—to erode the animal/human binary; the book also excels at emphasizing culture, widely defined, over canonical literature in animal studies. Readers will find this topic a welcome new focus in the field with a corresponding expansion of the canon of animal studies. From the beginning, authors in the collection note the paradoxes of the animal-child relationship in foundational Victorian children's texts. Ayres writes that the tenor of nursery rhymes changed in the 1830s as animals began to instruct children in kindness as well as the carnivore's discourse in which "birds and mice were on purpose for eating" (23). Keridiana Chez's chapter, "Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children's Literature," notes likewise that rabbits are the "sweetest pets as well as the sweetest flesh" in Victorian children's literature. She substantiates the claim that Victorian children's literature legitimizes "the most glaring discursive contradictions in our treatment of nonhuman Others" (31). In "Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children," Stacy Hoult-Saros shows that children and farm animals are equated in being unruly and in need of adult authority. Such texts disturb hierarchical thought, prefiguring the posthuman. In "A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales," Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir argue that the wolf in Victorian Anglo-Jewish tales, often represented as a pack animal defending its communal life, responds to British stereotypes of Jewish people as lone wolves. Emphasizing cohesion, the wolf in these tales resists the threat of assimilation. This essay introduced welcome new texts to this Victorianist, along with questions of how alternative cultural animal symbolism might prompt ethical thought about advocacy for wolves and their habitat now. Animal advocacy is at the forefront of Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's contribution. Her "Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate" expands our knowledge of Victorian periodical literature and children's advocacy for animals in a fascinating study of how the journal of the Band of Mercy, The Advocate (1879–83), renegotiated associations between animals and human children through their shared bodily vulnerability, muteness, and passivity. Despite the risks of this alliance, children sang, pledged, recited, and petitioned for animals. Through their public work, both animal and human bodies came to matter. Less obscure works by Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, and the Brontës, as well as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), also appear here. Constance Fulmer demonstrates that Eliot's novels satirize Victorian culture that treats children like animals and animals like children. Her survey will be valuable to those interested in animals in Eliot. Maier, in "Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës," shows that children abuse animals as they themselves have been abused. Maier also notices slippages between the ontological categories of animal and human [End Page 318] when adults (violently) refuse kindness to children as well as to animals. She also makes the important point that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824) was formed some sixty years before the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1884). Citing Donna Haraway, Maier notes that the relationships between both associations offer "not irrational denials of human weakness," but instead "clear-sighted recognition of the connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture" (qtd. in Maier 199). Her work, like Hoult-Saros's...

What Can You Do as an Eco-hero? A Study on the Ecopedagogical Potential of Dutch Non-fictional Environmental Texts for Children

AbstractIn the context of a global crisis around climate change, children continue to be largely excluded from environmental conversations. In order to change this, there has been an increased effort to produce children’s media that educates young readers about the origins, effects, and possible solutions to climate change. These environmental texts for children can contribute to the ecopedagogical project and provide children with the information and the language that are necessary to become conscious ecocitizens. This paper analyzes how children’s non-fiction books from the Netherlands enable young readers to develop socio-political agency regarding climate change and position themselves within discussions about this topic. A potential trap for children’s environmental literature lies in its tendency to simplify the complex issue of climate change and to offer potential ways for fighting climate change which are not accessible to all young readers. Therefore, the paper pays specific attention to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that are used in these books. The analysis is structured around Greta Gaard’s critical model for inclusive ecopedagogical texts, based on recognizing and dismantling alienation, hierarchy, and ultimately domination. The study finds that the books selected use contrasting techniques that alienate the reader from the already abstract concept of climate change. They encourage the reader to see themselves as possible “eco heroes” and propose different strategies for contributing to help the direct victims of climate change who are frequently positioned as distanced from the intended young reader. Nature is largely represented as a passive entity, which can play no role in restoring ecological balance.

Why are Célestin Freinet's «free texts» relevant again?

Introduction. The scientific and pedagogical heritage of the outstanding French humanist teacher of the first half of the twentieth century. Célestine Freinet (1896-1966) is extensive and diverse, and is of considerable value for domestic education. The purpose of the article is to reveal the relevance of the idea of using free children's texts in the pedagogical process put forward by Freinet and implemented by him in practice. This idea is particularly important in the work of general education and vocational schools in modern conditions characterized by the accelerated development of distance learning, the constant introduction of technological innovations, as well as the introduction of anti-epidemiological restrictions. Research methods are: a critical analysis of the works of S. Freinet, foreign and domestic authors, researchers of his pedagogical heritage, as well as biographical and historical methods. The research is based on an axiological approach that allows us to identify the value essence of the phenomena and facts to be studied. Results. The study contains biographical facts that characterize S. Freinet as an outstanding teacher and humanist. The article reveals his tireless activity in organizing teachers from different countries in international pedagogical organizations, which aimed at spreading advanced pedagogical ideas and humanistic traditions. The scientific views of Freinet on the use of free children's texts, which remain relevant to this day, as well as a number of other pedagogical views, are comprehensively analyzed. Discussion and conclusions. A critical, but generally positive assessment of S. Freinet's ideas from the standpoint of modern pedagogical science is given. Among them are the organization of education, the relationship between teachers and students, the social purpose of the school, etc. The scientific novelty of the study is to identify the relevance of a number of ideas of an outstanding French teacher, and, above all, about the use of free children's texts in domestic education, which has not previously been the subject of the study of domestic comparative teachers. S. Freinet is included by the author of the article in the book «100 great teachers». In 2021, the 125th anniversary of his birth is celebrated.

REVIEWS

This month I am thrilled to have Aaron Bradbury back again with another insightful review, alongside a fantastic home-learning companion book which I share a snippet from here. As for our picture books, take a look at a hand-picked selection of recently published children's texts focusing on two important areas: friendships and feelings.

Dinâmicas Pedagógicas em Educação Ambiental: a problemática das abelhas

Com este artigo pretendemos descrever as dinâmicas pedagógicas numa turma do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico (CEB), na qual, a problemática ambiental está relacionada com a relevância das abelhas. Primeiramente, acedemos às perceções dos alunos sobre as abelhas. A seguir, procedeu-se à implementação do trabalho de projeto, propriamente dito, com cinco atividades articuladas entre si: (1) a entrevista a um apicultor; (2) a análise de uma notícia; (3) o estudo da biologia da abelha e da vespa asiática; (4) debate e palavras-chave (5) o cartaz coletivo com a forma de «favos de mel». Por fim, acedemos de novo às perceções das crianças sobre as abelhas, para podermos compreender a progressão das referidas perceções. A abordagem metodológica é de cariz qualitativo-fenomenológico, tendo por base a metodologia de projeto no desenrolar das dinâmicas pedagógicas. Para a recolha de dados, recorreu-se ao desenho infantil e aos textos elaborados pelas crianças e para a análise dos dados recorreu-se ao instrumento de Stephen Kellert (1996) Os resultados obtidos revelam que houve transformação na forma como os alunos percecionam a natureza, da qual, nós também fazemos parte (Coutinho & Rocha, 2019).

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

Books shape how children learn about society and social norms, in part through the representation of different characters. To better understand the messages children encounter in books, we introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these image tools, along with established text analysis methods, to measure the representation of race, gender, and age in children’s books commonly found in US schools and homes over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but award-winning books, which are twice as likely to be checked out from libraries, persistently depict more lighter-skinned characters even after conditioning on perceived race. Across all books, children are depicted with lighter skin than adults. Over time, females are increasingly present but are more represented in images than in text, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. Relative to their growing share of the US population, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in the mainstream collection; males, particularly White males, are persistently overrepresented. Our data provide a view into the black box of education through children’s books in US schools and homes, highlighting what has changed and what has endured.

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

Books shape how children learn about society and social norms, in part through the representation of different characters. To better understand the messages children encounter in books, we introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these image tools, along with established text analysis methods, to measure the representation of race, gender, and age in children’s books commonly found in US schools and homes over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but award-winning books, which are twice as likely to be checked out from libraries, persistently depict more lighter-skinned characters even after conditioning on perceived race. Across all books, children are depicted with lighter skin than adults. Over time, females are increasingly present but are more represented in images than in text, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. Relative to their growing share of the US population, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in the mainstream collection; males, particularly White males, are persistently overrepresented. Our data provide a view into the black box of education through children’s books in US schools and homes, highlighting what has changed and what has endured. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought by Kenneth Kidd

Reviewed by: Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought by Kenneth Kidd Annette Wannamaker (bio) Kidd, Kenneth. Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought. Fordham UP, 2020. Theory for Beginners, Kenneth Kidd's third researched monograph, is both playful and tricky: playful in the way much theoretical musing is play and tricky in the way that children's literature scholarship often performs the role of the trickster. As is the case with his first two books, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (2004) and Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (2011), Theory for Beginners traces the archaeology of an idea in unexpected and refreshing ways. Making American Boys unravels the paradoxical social construction of naturally wild boyhood, and Freud in Oz resituates decades of psychoanalytic readings of children's fiction by looking instead at the ways the popularization of psychoanalytic theories influenced authors of children's texts. Theory for Beginners tangles with current approaches to both theory and children's literature by situating its subject matter in a space of opposition between two widely held assumptions: First, theory, as we always already know, is so very complex and inscrutable that even the sharpest graduate students are brought to tears of frustration by their first reading of Derrida or Cixous. And, second, children's literature is so very simple that, well, even a child can understand it. What could these two possibly have in common? Indeed, these two modes of thinking, writing, and reading—separated based on assumptions about simplicity or complexity rooted in the child/adult binary—are seen by many as being so incompatible that any attempt to join them or put them into dialogue with one another is laughable. Kidd begins his book discussing a 1963 book titled A Child's Guide to Freud, which is, obviously, a parody: "The joke here is that while Freud certainly had a lot to say about children, he did not usually talk to them, and we certainly have no business sharing Freud directly with them" (1). In this tongue-in-cheek way, Kidd sets up the idea of philosophy and theory for children as an impossibility, which is, after all, a perfect place to begin any discussion of children's literature. Just as the very idea of theory for children has been parodied, so have attempts by scholars to theorize about children's fiction. The most wellknown examples are Frederick Crews' satirical books The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, which make various critical approaches look ridiculous by applying them in far-fetched ways to discussions of a children's book. [End Page 244] Through hyperbole, Crews performs a mock analysis, a silly exercise meant to expose those academics so besotted by theory they have lost their collective minds and have started to theorize about children's books. Our field's vexed and ambivalent relationship with theory is also troubled by children's literature's connections to low-brow art and popular culture, our continued redheaded stepchild status in departments of English, and the devaluing of texts thought to be narrowly pedagogical. Within these contexts, the field's efforts over the past few decades to turn theory's gaze toward children's books in order to elevate the status of children's literature studies in the academy oftentimes merely ended up elevating the status of theory. This is the morass Theory for Beginners wades into and seeks to navigate, and Kidd's clever strategy is to unsettle these existing assumptions by shifting disciplinary perspective. The book is separated into three parts. The first shares perspectives of philosophers working to teach philosophical thinking to young people through works of literature; the next chapter shifts to a focus on "theory for beginners" books, those comic book primers many of us used to survive our first encounters with Foucault or Lacan; and the last chapter focuses on works of literature for younger readers that function as theory or philosophy. The argument that the structure of the book makes is that philosophers want to make philosophy accessible to children and theorists want to make theory accessible to beginners of all ages. Indeed, schools of...

AQG: Arabic Question Generator

The Arabic natural language process (ANLP) community does not have an automatic generator of questions for texts in the Arabic language. Our objective is to provide it one. This paper presents a novel automatic question generation approach that generates questions as a form of support for children learning through the platform QUIZZITO. Our approach combines the semantic role labelling of PropBank (SRL) and the flexibility of question models. It essentially relates to an approach of instantiation model of representation based on an analysis focused on the semantics. This allowed us to capture the maximum sense of sentence given the flexibility of the grammar of the Arabic language. This model was written in a set of Patterns and Templates based on the REGEX languages. Our goal is to enrich Quizzito's online quiz platform, which contains more than 254.5k quizzes, and to provide it with a generator of Arabic language questions for children's texts. Our Arabic Question Generator system (AQG) is functional and reaches up to 86% f-measure.

The Landscape Painting Interpretation Based on “Barrier-free” & “Barrier” Visualization Techniques

The process of painting interpretation handling and text writing resulted in insufficient attention to children's live speech; the teacher guided their activities, and individual interpretation of a painting is blocked by “barriers,” such as rigid teacher instructions, sample descriptive texts, and the like. The experimental technique was recognized based on establishing open educational communication between the teacher and pupils at the lesson, where primacy and value of the painting worked as a visual image. The research represented the comparative analysis of children's texts. The results were as follows: first,n comparison of text drafts and final versions describing the painting; second, third, analysis of pupils' worksheets for comparing two paintings; fourth,n analysis of individual memos. The research concluded that the “barrier” technique, where pupils should respond on already prepared text, resulted in less detailed statements with fewer figurative expressions, and also increased the similarity of the texts, that was “leveling up” of perception and vision of the painting by children. “Barrier-free” technique ran effectively because it helped children build educational and personal communication.

Loudness and Intelligibility of Irrelevant Background Speech Differentially Hinder Children's Short Story Reading

Reading skills are usually assessed in silent conditions, but children often experience noisy educational settings. Effects of auditory distraction on children's reading skills remain relatively unexplored. The present study investigates the influence of two features of background speech—intelligibility and loudness—on children's reading speed and comprehension. Sixty‐three 8‐to‐10‐year‐old elementary school children performed a reading task in the context of single‐talker background speech. Background speech was either intelligible or unintelligible and presented at low (45–50 dB SPL) or moderate (65–72 dB SPL) sound intensity (here termed “loudness”). Results showed a differential effect of intelligibility and loudness, respectively affecting children's comprehension and reading speed. In addition, the intelligibility effect was larger in children with lower interference control, as assessed with an auditory Stroop task. Our findings provide evidence for the influence of different properties of background speech on children's text reading with implications for reading in everyday classroom environments.Lay SummaryChildren often read in noisy environments, but we know little about how background chatter might affect their reading. Here, we found that 8–10‐year‐old children read stories more slowly with louder background speech. The children also understood less about a story if the background voice was speaking in their own language—especially those who, in a different task, were less able to ignore irrelevant but attention‐grabbing information. This suggests background speech differentially affects beginning readers.

Descobrindo a língua: as relações entre fala e escrita no processo de aquisição da linguagem

A Associação Brasileira de Linguística (Abralin), durante o período da pandemia, em 2020, promoveu uma série de mesas-redondas, transmitidas ao vivo pelo canal da associação no YouTube. O objetivo desta resenha é apresentar a mesa redonda: A criança e o uso da língua: fala, escrita e suas relações na aquisição da linguagem, que abordou o emprego da língua pela criança enquanto falante e escrevente. No primeiro momento, o professor Lourenço Chacon apresentou dados não convencionais da escrita infantil de modo a observar a relação fala/oralidade e escrita/letramento. Em seguida, a professora Marlete Diedrich explorou a aquisição da linguagem como uma experiência de significação a partir de uma perspectiva enunciativa, baseada nos postulados de Benveniste (2005). Por fim, a professora Gabriela Maria de Oliveira-Codinhoto apresentou uma proposta funcionalista de textos infantis com ênfase na frequência de utilização de orações relativas em produções textuais de crianças.

Line Breaks, Page Turns, and Gutters: Formal Moments of Silence in Children's Texts

This essay explores the potential of blank spaces between and around words on a page as visual and verbal metaphors for silence as well as the alternative possibilities they offer for creating meaning. Through metaphorical readings of a diverse range of texts, including verse novels, picturebooks, and graphic narratives, the essay argues for resisting a Lacanian ethics of the Imaginary, which seeks closure through the imposition of totalising personal meanings onto readings of texts and other people, in favour of an ethics of the Real, which leaves open the possibility for incomplete and paradoxical meanings to appear.