This study describes how the children’s literature critic Shin Torigoe gave meaning to mothers’ evaluations of the picture book The Story of Little Black Sambo by analyzing the documents of a bunko (a local children’s book service where mothers could gather with one another to discover and discuss children’s literature) on the text available in the 1960s. Although The Story of Little Black Sambo was self-censored and went out of print around 1990 because of its racial overtones, the book had been popular in Japan through the 1960s. For this reason, a study of The Story of Little Black Sambo from the 1960s illustrates how picture books were evaluated in post-war Japan.

  Torigoe recognized The Story of Little Black Sambo before he became involved in his local bunko in the mid-1960s. He educated mothers through the bunko’s activities so that they could appreciate the value of the story, and he helped them to build confidence in their discerning eye for picture books. Nevertheless, he described it as somewhat of a coincidence that the mothers evaluated The Story of Little Black Sambo the same way that he had. This suggests the power imbalance between the critic, as an educator, and mothers, as students, in the evaluation of picture books.

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  The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of Osamu Dazai’s “Hashire, Melos”, which had the most influence on posterity in “The Legend of Melos”, and to make meaning from the relationship with “The Legend of Melos” spread in Japan.
  The way to characterize was by identifying the original text and then comparing it.
  In conclusion, it has been clarified that it depicts the psychology of human beings and it is characterized by the consistent impossibility of sincerity. Moreover, because of this characteristic, we pointed out that “Hashire, Melos” have become an influential text.

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  This study aims to investigate the cohesion features of material marked for young readers of English and to examine whether such features predict their readability. A total of 129 texts were collected from the material written for young readers of English. These texts varied in the levels of difficulty (readability) assigned by experts. The texts were analyzed using a computational tool, the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (Crossley et al., 2019), that produces over 150 indices related to text cohesion. Some indices were selected after controlling for correlations, normality, and multicollinearity, and were then used as predictors in the multiple regression analysis to estimate the readability level of the texts. The results demonstrated that the combination of indices in (a) verb overlap between adjacent two sentences, (b) semantic overlap between adjacent sentences, (c) the use of temporal connectives, and (d) the number of repeated content words accounted for 37% of the variance in readability. The difficulty level of the texts increased as they contained less verb overlap and semantic overlap between sentences, and showed less repetition of content words, but included more temporal connectives. These results have been discussed in the paper in light of the theories of discourse comprehension and characteristics of texts written for young readers. The study's findings provide theoretical implications for developing reading materials for young learners of English. The findings also highlight the importance of considering the multidimensional features of text cohesion as well as the developmental stages of targeted readers when evaluating text readability.

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  Teaching Japanese and reading requires students to read a wide variety of texts. However, to determine the kind of texts to read, it is necessary to know not only the classification of texts based on expert knowledge but also the way readers perceive and classify texts. This study explored how readers perceive stories, according to genre ( i.e., the cognitive genre ). First, we conducted a survey asking readers what tags describe the content of stories. We then conducted another survey asking which stories readers would recommend to read and which tags were applied to the stories. Throughout the study, we showed that, in addition to genres that are applied to popular works, genres that are seldom read are independently recognized. In the analysis of the relationship of tag, we discussed similarity and exclusivity of each genre. Although these characteristics of cognitive genre have not received much attention in previous genre studies, we believe that they provide useful insights into material selection in education.

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  This research analyses situations during reading classes in kindergartens and elementary schools with the aim to highlight differences and commonalities and to elaborate on instruction measures that enable continuity between the two stages. Reading classes of “The Giant Turnip” at seven kindergartens and eight elementary schools were studied by natural observation, and semistructured interviews with the teachers followed. The study was focused on the differences and commonalities of physical environments and instruction contents at the two stages. As an example for the physical environment, in kindergartens, the typical class consisted of teachers reading aloud only picture books once without repeating. On contrary, in elementary schools, students and teachers were physically more distant. Students were instructed to be seated at their desk and read individually. Textbooks were read repeatedly and diverse learning materials were used. For instruction contents, in kindergartens, children’s reaction was taken into consideration by teachers as the classes proceeded, and instructions contents on scenes and characters, the peritexts such as the link between the front and back cover and guessing plots were typically observed. On the other hand, in elementary schools, classes were more controlled and initiated by teachers. Children were instructed to learn a broader range of aspects on the contents which not only limited to the ones taught at kindergartens but also feelings of characters and authors’intention of expression. The research indicates that for a smoother transitioning, (1) in elementary schools, creating a safe environment where children can learn to read voluntarily and be initiative to ask questions by having a physical intimacy between the teacher and students to share a picture book, and (2) in kindergartens, instruction contents need to be flexibly adjusted accordingly to each child’s reactions and literacy level.

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  This study aimed to develop a measure of children’s listening ability in the classroom and to examine its reliability and validity. In the Elementary School Course of Study Commentary (2008), children’s listening ability in the classroom was defined as the ability to “listen” to instruction. The following factors were extracted from factor analyses: factor 1 “Advanced listening comprehension” and factor 2 “Basic listening comprehension,” and these were developed into a scale consisting of a total of ten items, with five items under each factor. The validity was confirmed through the method of nomination and factor analysis for verification.

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