Abstract
Children's literature products; have an important function in terms of preparing children for life, setting an example for them and giving them experience. Regardless of the age group, the child identifies with the heroes of the stories he / she reads and creates a model for himself from these characters. Fictional characters have an important role in helping children acquire the necessary skills to solve the problems they experience in daily life. Children seek answers to the questions that arise in their minds through these characters in the books. This study is the first of a series of studies in which the concept of girl in Turkish children‘s literature is planned to be examined in different dimensions. In this study, the representation of the term girl in Turkish children's books was investigated in the context of gender and gender roles. In the study, the collocation analysis method was used with a corpus-based approach, aiming to reach objective and more generalizable results based on a large database. In this context, firstly, the collocations of the kız (girl) in the Turkish Children's Literature Corpus, which is the most comprehensive corpus on Turkish children's literature, were determined and then evaluated in terms of overdetermination, identification, appraisement, nomination, individualisation, assimilation, indetermination, and differentiation categories, which Van Leeuwen (1996) emphasized the importance in the representation of social actors. As a result of the analysis, it has been revealed that the collocation patterns in Turkish children's literature can cause the formation of a girl prototype drawn in the minds of children within the framework of gender stereotypes.