Children’s Patterns in Describing Fiction Books

This study aims to identify syntactic and semantic description patterns from summaries of fiction books or book chapters created by children. These patterns can be considered as a metadata scheme that describes the main content of a book. Two groups of primary school students in Hong Kong, ages 8–11, were invited to read a Chinese fiction book and an English fiction book and were asked to write a summary. Ten syntactic and semantic description patterns were identified from the summaries. These patterns can be used to enhance the description of fiction books.