Children’s Songs in Arabic Studies: A Critical Study of the Challenge of Discourse Participants

Abstract

This study falls within the domain of meta-criticism because it addresses the challenges faced in documenting and studying children’s songs. Upon examining what has been produced in this field of writing, a number of questions emerged that collectively constituted the core research problem of the present study. Such questions were:  Has this type of writing received critical studies that trace its development and investigate its foundations and points of departure? Have the challenges   inherent in this mode of genre been examined through a rigorous critical inquiry that identifies problems and proposes solutions? What are the main problems that have affected children’s song collections in terms of the participants in the discourse? And can we arrive at a new vision for documenting and studying children’s songs?

The relevance of investigating the challenges of documenting children’s songs is grounded in the need to renew this field of writing. Such renewal cannot be achieved in subsequent works without first examining earlier ones and engaging critically with their issues and problems. This rationale justified the choice of the present topic, particularly in the light of the absence of a specialized critical study addressing this specific research aspect to the best of the researcher’s knowledge.

To delimit the scope of the study, the researcher selected four books which constituted the corpus of the study and through which he examined the identified challenges. In compiling this corpus, the researcher restricted himself to the classical and popular heritage of children’s songs, without addressing modern children’s song texts.

The structure of the study required dividing it into an introduction, four main sections and a conclusion. The four main sections were as follows:

-Efforts in the documentation and study of children’s songs.

-Challenges related to the author.

-Challenges related to the text.

-Challenges related to the recipient.