Describing the design of children’s books: an analytical approach

Descriptions of graphic language are relatively rare compared to descriptions of spoken language. This paper presents an analytical approach to studying the visual attributes and conventions in children’s reading and information books. The approach comprises development of a checklist to record ‘features’ of visual organization, such as those relevant to typography and layout, illustration and the material qualities of the books, and consideration of the contextual factors that influence the ways that features have been organized or treated. The contextual factors particularly relevant to children’s reading include educational policy, legibility and vision research and typeface development and availability. The approach to analysis and description is illustrated with examples of children’s reading and information books from the Typographic Design for Children database, which also demonstrates an application of the checklist approach.

Implicit learning and imperceptible influence: Syncretic literacy of multilingual Chinese children.

This article reports on an ethnographic study involving the literacy practices of two multilingual Chinese children from two similar yet different cultural and linguistic contexts: Montreal and Singapore. Using syncretism as a theoretical tool, this inquiry examines how family environment and support facilitate children’s process of becoming literate in multiple languages. Informed by sociocultural theory, the inquiry looks in particular at the role of grandparents in the syncretic literacy practices of children. Through comparative analysis, the study reveals similarities and differences that, when considered together, contribute to our understanding of multilingual children’s creative forms of learning with regard to their rich literacy resources in multiple languages, the imperceptible influences of mediators, various learning styles and syncretic literacy practices.

Sibling influence on the human capital of the left-behind

While a growing literature has analyzed the effects of parental migration on the educational outcomes of children left behind, this study is the first to highlight the importance of sibling interactions in such a context. Using panel data from the RUMiC Survey, we find that sibling influence on school performance is stronger among left- behind children. Hence, parental migration seems to trigger changes in familial roles and sibling effects among children. However, it is primarily older sisters who exhibit a positive influence on their younger siblings. We corroborate our results by performing a series of tests to mitigate endogeneity issues. The results from the analysis suggest that sibling effects in migrant households might be a mechanism shaping children’s outcomes and success and that adjustments within the family left behind have the potential to generate benefits – or reduce hardships – in response to parental migration.