Read the story once for students to gain an overall appreciation. Then read it again, asking students to note details about the culture it reflects. Have students add to the original chart, or create a second chart to record their observations. Are there any new topics to add to the original list? What similarities and differences do students find between the two tales? Give students the opportunity to look closely at the illustrations that accompany these folktales.
The modern editions of folktales often have illustrations that are closely based on historical knowledge. What do the pictures in these two folktales show about the traditional culture of China? This activity could be expanded by having students in small groups report on other Chinese folktales. We recommend The Eyes of the Dragon , the story of a magistrate whose uncontrolled pride releases a dragon of such power that the wall protecting his village is completely destroyed.
The Dragon's Pearl, about a mother's love for her child and the importance of work, also provides insights about the traditional use of walls to protect Chinese villages and the central importance of farming to Chinese culture. After reading many tales and observing what they have in common, students may be prepared to offer some general statements about the culture reflected in traditional Chinese folktales.
While the teacher should be open to their ideas, it is also essential to point out the limits of what they have read, and to correct any misconceptions about both traditional and modern China that may develop from this activity.
Traditional African Folktales African folktales are as rich in diversity as the continent itself. As with China, introduce this activity with a map of Africa, pointing to the countries or subregions where the tales to be used originated. Similarly, have students look for illustrations that show both traditional and modern aspects of these cultures.
Students should chart their observations in the same way they did with Chinese folktales. In this story, the spider man Ananse must be very clever to tell stories belonging only to the Sky God. Follow this with another Anansi tale, perhaps Anansi Goes Fishing , in which Turtle tricks Anansi into doing all of the work while he takes life easy.
The many tales of Anansi reflect both humor and societal values as the spider learns one lesson after another in trying to outwit his animal friends.
As a contrast to this trickster cycle, read students The Orphan Boy , a Maasai tale from East Africa that explains why Kileken the planet Venus appears in the sky both in the morning and at night.
Engage the class in a discussion of how these tales are similar and how they differ. Students can learn more about the values rooted in traditional African cultures as small groups read other tales and the class discusses them.
For example, the value of generosity as opposed to the detrimental effects of greed is clearly demonstrated in John Steptoe's version of a Zimbabwe story, Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale. African folktales do not always spell out their message, but may leave the ending for the audience to interpret.
Although the experience of challenging Elephant-and being tumbled unconscious across the savannah in a spray of water-should teach otherwise, Young Mouse awakens to observe that it must have "rained" and washed Elephant away. The story ends with Young Mouse's reflection: "And in that case, she should consider herself fortunate, for I would have broken her apart and stomped her to bits.
Geography and language arts can work together as students trace the roots of African folktales. Have students in groups prepare an index card about the story they have read which includes: 1 its title, 2 a one-line summary, and 3 one thing it suggests about its culture of origin. Students should place the index cards on the map, or so as to encircle the map, attaching them to the proper location with yarn and pushpins. Folktales can also be good vehicles to bring creative dramatics into the classroom.
Students can work in small groups to perform their favorite stories. They might make simple tagboard masks for use with a few other props to highlight the action. The audience's imaginations will fill in the background as the actors bring folktales to life.
Traditional Russian Folktales Help students locate Russia on an up-to-date map. Explain how the shape of Russia has changed since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and point out the countries that have been newly created e. This is a necessary background for creating a bulletin board display, since the pictures that students bring in to show "Russia" may in fact illustrate what has become another nation. Again, have students prepare charts to note their observations about the stories to be read.
As with other folklore traditions, Russian folktales have characteristic patterns of action and behavior. The model performs well, with an R 2 score of 0.
Note that a simple baseline model which always predicts the expected i. Adding content-based features thus greatly improves the accuracy of estimation. With confidence in the performance of the model as well as knowledge about its degree of mismeasurement, we can employ it to provide the stories with uncertain publication dates with a re-estimated year of publication.
Figure 1b displays the model re-estimations against the date estimations provided in the bibliographic records. Footnote 5 Interestingly, the clear linear relationship suggests a global agreement between the re-estimations and estimated bibliographic record dates, but the lower R 2 score 0.
Note that stories with known, unambiguous publication dates remain unaltered over the parallel data sets, as their measurement error is assumed to be zero. In the analysis below, we fit n logistic regression models to these datasets separately and subsequently pool the results across models. By means of illustration, Fig. The graph clearly shows that most of the uncertainty regarding publication date is situated around the year Neal, The choice for Bayesian rather than frequentist methods was motivated by three considerations.
Second, an attractive property of Bayesian statistics is their increased interpretability, allowing us to straightforwardly answer questions about the probability of our estimates to be within a certain interval. A crucial aspect of Bayesian regression modelling is the specification of priors.
From a linguistic perspective, there is no a priori reason to assume that mere progression of time influences the choice between indefinite or definite reference. We formalise this as a sceptical prior, which is centred at zero and thus assumes it is most likely that time does not have an effect. To leave some probability for possible outlier values, our sceptical prior takes the form of a Normal distribution with zero mean and scale 2.
Ghosh et al. We employ the same conservative prior for the remaining fixed effects Pictorial presence and Opening phrase. A similar zero mean prior is used for the Intercept with zero mean and scale These priors are reasonable after scaling all regression predictors. Following Gelman et al.
An additional benefit of rescaling the regression variables is that the regression output is easier to interpret. Gelman and Rubin, , we assessed the convergence of the models.
As a further means of evaluation, we employed projective variable selection as described by Piironen and Vehtari and implemented in the R package projpred Piironen et al. Simply put, projective variable selection is a two-stage method for finding sparse, minimal subsets of features that perform well on predicting new, unseen data.
The first stage revolves around finding a good performing model, irrespective of model sparsity. The second stage, then, is to find sparser models that provide similar predictions as the reference model.
Validation of the variable selection process happens through approximate leave-one-out LOO cross-validation see Piironen et al. If our hypothesis holds i. As an additional hypothesis, we suggested that i the presence of pictures of the wolf or Red Riding Hood has a positive effect on the probability of definite first mentions, and ii that in the case of Red Riding Hood, the effect of time is mitigated by the co-occurrence of her introduction and traditional fairy tale opening phrases.
Table 4 presents a summary of the regression model results for story introductions of the wolf. As such, there is ample evidence that the estimated probability for definite introductions of the wolf increases steadily over time. As such, both estimates seem to positively contribute to the probability of definite first mentions of the wolf.
How do these results compare to the first mentions of Red Riding Hood? The results are presented in Table 5. The predictor year has a mean estimate of 0. The presence of pictures of Red Riding Hood has a similar effect as with the wolf, with a mean estimate of 0. To find out whether sparser versions exists of our model, we perform a projective variable selection procedure.
The procedure selects opening as the sole predictor. It appears that the effect of time plays a considerably smaller role in definite first mentions of Red Riding Hood than in those of the wolf, which is largely to be attributed to her co-occurrence with traditional opening phrases.
First mentions of the wolf are not affected by these opening phrases, as the wolf is predominantly introduced mid-story when the constraints of conventional opening phrases no longer apply. Moreover, traditional opening phrases have become increasingly frequent over time, thus decreasing the probability of definite first mentions even further. The model results in Table 6 provide some statistical evidence for this time-dependent increase of conventional opening phrases.
The mean estimate of 0. In this final discussion we wish to offer some additional explanations on why we interpret these findings as such, as well as some additional reflections on what it means to observe this trend. First, our corpus contains a collection of Dutch literary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, which were based on the literary retellings of, among others, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.
These retellings are, in their turn, likely rooted in a non-literary, oral tradition Tehrani et al. Thus, one could argue that a limitation of our study is that, even before the first literary retelling, oral versions of the story were already known. It is, of course, important to consider the role of oral versions when we investigate the hypothesis that the use of definite reference reflects the cultural entrenchment of the story. Unfortunately, there is no information available concerning a possible oral tradition in the Dutch language area.
However, even if we assume that such an oral tradition existed and pre-dated the literary version, the interpretation of the results remains the same. First, in the corpus used in this study, all stories can ultimately be traced back to either Perrault or the Brothers Grimm Karsdorp and Van den Bosch, , who, tellingly, both opted for indefinite reference indicating an assessment of unfamiliarity by the authors despite any possible oral tradition.
Retellings in the corpus where definite reference is chosen, then, should still be considered mutations of the base versions. Second, while our results indicate a pronounced increase of definite introduction over time, there are already cases of definite introduction even in the oldest story versions in our corpus. This may indicate that the story was already relatively well-known through oral versions in the Netherlands in the early 19th century.
In sum, it is indeed possible that the story was already familiar to the target audience through oral version, but it remains important that there is a pronounced change in the way literary authors present the story frame and its characters.
At the maximum level of deliberateness, we should consider any folk and fairy tale author as a special kind of language user who deliberately manipulates the linguistic mechanism of in definite referent introduction to profile the story in a certain way to their audience.
A weaker interpretation of our findings is more appropriate when we assume that the observed trend is the reflection of an emerging narrative strategy in which folk and fairy tale authors deliberately opt for definite introduction of characters to portray the story as if it is part of collective cultural memory. However, the latter, weaker interpretation only works if we assume that cultural entrenchment and collective cultural memory exist to such an extent that skilled and lesser skilled authors can wilfully manipulate their audience with it.
However, such manipulation could only work within a very specific context where an author presents one particular, new story to an audience. As such, we would not expect definite first mentions of folktale characters to be possible in other contexts see e. Turning to the discussion of the observed developments from a Cultural Evolution stance, we should first address the question whether the increased use of definite introduction can be explained by random mutation and neutral transmission.
The remaining alternative explanation of neutral transmission, then, pertains to the subsequent spread of the feature. In a neutral model, individuals randomly select a cultural trait for adoption, where the chance of being selected is proportional to the frequency of a trait in the population.
The model thus predicts that more frequent traits are more likely to get adopted than less frequent ones. Karsdorp and Van den Bosch, , an important question is whether the observed increase in definite reference can and perhaps should be attributed to such random copying behaviour, thus unintentionally favouring popular prior retellings containing definite first mentions.
Indeed, in the present case, it is very difficult to ascertain whether the observed increase in definite reference should be ascribed to individual copying behaviour or to the global effect of cultural entrenchment, or, at least, there is no meaningful way to disentangle the two explanatory scenarios as they are intertwined. As such, even if an author makes a spontaneous choice for one of the strategies instead of copying , we cannot distinguish it from copying acts, as the number of possible introduction strategies is fixed.
Thus, we cannot completely rule out the possible influence of random copying behaviour on the propagation of definite first mentions. Resulting from concentrating on simulations of oral transmission chains, an important difference between these experiments and our case is their focus on individual biases and memory limitations and how these affect the way stories are passed on from one participant generation to the next.
Furthermore, these experiments are designed in such a way that it is unlikely that participants already know the story. As such, an interesting line of future experimental research would be to investigate the effect of assumed familiarity and, more generally, assumed shared knowledge, on story transmission.
A recent study by Stubbersfield et al. Using a chain design in which participants are requested to alter a written news item, thus eliminating inhibiting effects of recall, Stubbersfield et al.
Guided variation is defined in Cultural Evolution as one of the main mechanisms responsible for cultural variation. It could be argued that the increase of definite first mentions as a function of cultural entrenchment can be conceptualised as an example of guided variation by pragmatic principles. As such, introducing characters by means of definite reference can be seen as a fitness-enhancing cultural mutation, to, for example, bring the story closer to the target audience.
It is, in our view, certainly worth pursuing the multidisciplinary angle presented in this study, where insights from theoretical linguistics—in particular conversational principles of speaker-addressee dynamics as formulated in pragmatics—are put forward as explanatory factors in cultural evolution and guided variation of cultural artefacts constructed with language.
For instance, besides documenting changes in cultural entrenchment as visible in linguistic encoding , further research should also consider the possible effects of these linguistic choices on the evolution of the concepts they are meant to capture. Tehrani, The discussion here focuses on how first-mention definites are caused by extra-textual or exophoric rather than intra-textual endophoric reference.
Exophoric reference includes reference to shared world knowledge as discussed in this section as well as immediate physical context e.
It should be noted, however, that the addition of pictures to a story is not necessarily something controlled by authors, but could also be the result of choices made by the editor or publisher.
When the bibliographic records provide a date range as estimation, we take the mean of the range as reference point. Since folktales have been passed down through the oral tradition, they were honed for listening so they were easy to remember and share. As a result, folktales make it easier for children to differentiate characters, follow a plotline or recall a sequence of events. Not surprisingly, working with folktales can also help children develop the critical reading skills of phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension needed to meet the requirements defined in the Common Core Standards for Reading.
While these classic stories are not only highly entertaining, they also play an important role in passing along core values or character traits.
Folktales were often employed to share a common history, to reinforce cultural values or highlight important traditions. When people belonged to a tribe or lived in a small village, by necessity they needed to be able to get along well under a variety of circumstances and minimize conflict. Typically, only the chief, a high priest or a Shaman could confront someone over committing an offense.
As a result, stories were often shared to intentionally clarify how a transgression had occurred. As folktales were passed down over generations they modeled behaviors and helped reinforce expectations about how to live a meaningful life. Over time, folktales subtly incorporated character traits like caring, resourcefulness, trust or courage into the fabric of the stories.
Folk tales often explain something that happens in nature or convey a certain truth about life. Folk tales are stories passed down through generations of people. Fables are just one type of folk tale — short stories, often featuring talking animals, that teach a lesson. The simplified story lines and characters of folk tales and fables make them great for teaching life lessons to little ones.
The study of folklore is important in understanding ancient beliefs, traditions and even rituals. Folklore consists of both spiritual and material aspects. Africans, like people elsewhere in the world, have a set of values which they consider worthwhile and necessary for the preservation and wellbeing of their culture. As a result, folktales are often used as a vehicle for transmitting and preserving shared values and collective experience. Fables shape our culture rather than reflect it, because they are timeless and convey a moral and message, instead of describing how the culture was at the time they were written.
Traditions Matter. Traditions represent a critical piece of our culture.
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