Abstract
From Year 2 in primary school, literacy pedagogy in Czechia relies heavily on anthologies of excerpts from 19-21C children's literature. These tend to be primarily seen as a conduit of expertise while their potential in fostering reading for pleasure is overlooked.
We redress this gap, asking whether they provide school children with diverse and intriguing reading material. Specifically, we report a study of how characters are represented through thoughts, feelings, and bodily actions in Year 3 narrative prose content (13 anthologies, 531 excerpts).
First, we treated each excerpt at whole-text level, documenting its historical period, narrative point of view, provenance (original vs. translated), but also the presence and complexity of inner states (cognition/mentalisation, emotion, bodily action) in different types of characters (male, female, animal, other). Overall analyses show a striking disproportion in the representation of male and female characters.
Males are represented in far more excerpts than females and display higher complexity, especially in cognition/mentalisation and bodily action. However, this disproportion does not apply to translated excerpts and varies across periods in unexpected ways.
To get a better idea of the quality rather than quantity of character representation, we are now conducting a fine-grained analysis. Using Atlas.ti, we are annotating a purposeful sample of excerpts for text traits underlying, or recalibrating, the above findings.
Our key early observation is that female characters are usually depicted through their emotions. Male characters, on the other hand, tend rather to contemplate, plan, or remember things.
Also, we observe differences in how male and female characters express emotions through their bodies. For instance, males tend to "growl," females "scream." When happy or scared, female characters' emotions are mirrored in their faces (through smiles, smirks, tears), whereas male bodies are more often enlisted as wholes (they freeze, shiver).
We consider the pedagogical implications of our findings.