This dissertation aims to study three very important works in English children&rsquo / s fiction: C. S. Lewis&rsquo / s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Philip Pullman&rsquo / s The Subtle Knife, the second book of his trilogy His Dark Materials, and J. K. Rowling&rsquo / s Harry Potter and the Philosopher&rsquo / s Stone. The novels will be analyzed in terms of their approaches toward the conventions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance / to this end, the novels are to be evaluated in relation to their concept of chronotope, and the quest of good versus evil. While the secondary world or multiple worlds presented are going to be analyzed in terms of their perception of time and space along with the presentation of the supernatural elements, the characters will be evaluated in terms of the common classification good versus evil. The main argument of this study concentrates on the gradual estrangement from the crystal clear distinctions of the fairy tale genre to a more shadowy, pessimistic, and ambivalent vision of the fantastic in the children&rsquo / s literature.

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between preschool children&rsquo / s reading attitudes and their home literacy environment. In addition, children&rsquo / s perceptions of reading in terms of their reading attitudes were examined as a part of this study. The sample of this study consisted of 261 parents and their 5 year-old children who were enrolled preschool in Ankara, Turkey. The data of this study were collected through child interviews, demographic information forms, and the following questionnaires: the Home Literacy Environment Questionnaire (Umek et al., 2005) and the Preschool Children Reading Attitudes (Saracho, 1986) questionnaire. These questionnaires were both translated into Turkish, and statistical analyses were conducted to control for validity and reliability issues through a pilot study. The results of the study showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between preschool children&rsquo / s reading attitudes and their home literacy environment. In addition, the study revealed there were some differences in children&rsquo / s reading attitudes and their home literacy environment in regards to demographic variables. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that children who have more positive reading attitudes tended to give clearer and more detailed responses to questions and were more aware that writing contains messages. In addition, those children mentioned letters and the role of letters in the learning to read process.

This study aims to investigate the relations between the dimensions of parental expressivity which are positivity, negative dominant expressivity, negative submissive expressivity, family environment and child&rsquo / s coping strategies, and the effect of child temperament on this relation .111 preschool children between the ages of 4 and 6 years and their families participated in the study. Family expressivity as assessed with Halberstadt&rsquo / s Self Expressivennes in the Family Questionnaire. Three subscales of Family Environment Scale which are cohesion, expressivity and conflict were utilized to measure the relation in the family. In order to determine how the child copes with situation specific stress Vignette Assessment of Preschool Children&rsquo / s Coping Strategies was used. VAPCCS consists of four stressful vignettes that are mastery challenge, peer conflict, parent&ndash / child conflict and separation situations. Child&rsquo / s coping strategies were coded as five coping strategies, problem approach and problem avoidance, passive acceptance, and emotion venting. Child&rsquo / s temperamental characteristics were assessed with Colorado Child Temperament Inventory. Results revealed that children&rsquo / s temperamental characteristics did not predict children&rsquo / s coping strategy by its own. However, child coping strategies varied in the interaction of different child temperament characteristics and dimensions of maternal emotional expressivity. Children&rsquo / s soothability moderated the relation between maternal negative submissive expressivity and children&rsquo / s problem approach coping. Moreover, children tended to use less problem avoidance coping strategy in cases where mothers expressed negative submissive emotion more frequently in the family and when children had highly sociable temperamental characteristics. Overall, the results of the study suggested that when fluctuations in the degree of expression of negative emotion in the family are taken into consideration with children&rsquo / s temperamental characteristics, they influence how the children cope with stress.

The aim of this work is to study the interaction between two classical objects of mathematics: the modular group, and the absolute Galois group. The latter acts on the category of finite index subgroups of the modular group. However, it is a task out of reach do understand this action in this generality. We propose a lattice which parametrizes a certain system of &rdquo / geometric&rdquo / elements in this category. This system is setwise invariant under the Galois action, and there is a hope that one can explicitly understand the pointwise action on the elements of this system. These elements admit moreover a combinatorial description as quadrangulations of the sphere, satisfying a natural nonnegative curvature condition. Furthermore, their connections with hypergeometric functions allow us to realize these quadrangulations as points in the moduli space of rational curves with 8 punctures. These points are conjecturally defined over a number field and our ultimate wish is to compare the Galois action on the lattice elements in the category and the corresponding points in the moduli space.