Narrative Research On Children's Audio Stories

Geared up by the increasing adoption of mobile internet and the implementation of two-child policy,the audio content industry for children has seen dramatic boom and become a competitive area for mobile audio content platforms.According to the market reports of three leading audio sharing platforms Himalaya FM,Dragonfly FM and Lychee FM,the audience rate of kids audio stories ranks top three,accounting for more than ten percentages of total listenership.In addition,based on the big data analysis in recent years,the play count of audio stories for children ranks first in children user group.In this regard,the content of children audio stories deserves a high attention as high-quality stories may help platforms to generate profits and children listeners to obtain useful information.However,currently,the quality of audiobooks for children cannot be maintained because everyone has the chance to create stories on the platforms.This study aims explore the prevailing narrative means and narrative strategies of audio stories for children by sampling audio stories for children from ranking lists of each platform,and analyzing the content of the samples with indicators set based on narratology-related theories.In this study,the author constructs a prevailing narrative framework of audio stories for children.In terms of narrative subjects,the narrators of children audio stories for are a unique narrative consortium that includes both voice narrators,who are predominantly female characters,and content narrators,who are predominantly absent narrators.The content narrator determines the voice narrator,and the voice narrator influences the content narrator in return.They cooperate with each other to complete the narrator's narrative work;in terms of narrative time,the narrative time of children audio stories is usually limited to 1-7 minutes.Except for the detective and investigative stories that focus on narrative by flashback,other stories mainly adopt sequential narrative,and have a title with strong pre-narration and high summarization of the whole story;in terms of narrative structure,kids audiobooks prefer basic sequences,with less use of compound sequences and more use of mosaic compound sequences in the rare compound narratives;in light of narrative type,children audiobooks prefer completion-type combinations of experiencing frustrations and completing tasks;Additionally,characters popular between children are particularly preferred.Normally there are 2-4 animal characters with distinctive attributes;For the application of the narrative rhetoric,the authors tend to make use of parallelism and repetition to express key information and plot to deepen the memory effect of children.Meanwhile,coupled with single background music throughout and diverse stereo and sound,voice-overs skilled in changing timbre and breath to play role of characters with different gender,personality and age are able to make the narrative works a vivid presentation.In order to improve the acceptance of children audiobooks,the creators are highly consistent in their narrative situations,i.e.,they mostly present the stories in a combination of"telling" and "acting",making good use of the third person to narrate the stories,and the narrative perspective is more inclined to the cohesive perspective of narrating through the perspective of the characters in the stories,making the audience's sense of immersion significantly enhanced.In addition to the listed narrative means above,the author explores two strategies of narrative presentation.One strategy is mainly reflected in the inclination of tragedies,where the creator often connects suffering,such as parting and death,with children's fantasy.This connection is not false,but relatively rational and realistic to help children to fill their knowledge gaps and establish an optimistic concept of life.The other strategy is reflected in the attention to education.With the existence of excellent traditional elements,these stories can imperceptibly t influence the cognitive structure of children,so as to realize the silent educational effects.Furthermore,audio stories for children drive parent-child interaction,which also has positive significance for enhancing parent-child relationship.