Multicultural children's literature and story writing: A needs analysis in East Java

Textbook development for prospective primary school teachers requires evidence about both learners’ needs and the suitability of narrative models. This study quantitatively reanalyzes two four-category questionnaire distributions from 120 students in the reported East Java setting, integrates documentary lecturer and student needs, and audits a supplementary public corpus. Plot-development difficulty attracted 103 agreements (85.83%; conditional 95% Wilson interval 78.48–90.96%), and characterization difficulty attracted 105 (87.50%; 80.40–92.28%). Both items had a median response of agree; strongly agree responses were less frequent, at 12.50% and 15.00%. Enumeration of all 16 feasible joint tables established that 88–103 students must have reported both difficulties, assuming a common complete-response sample. Across those tables, exact McNemar p-values ranged from .500 to .860, providing no support for prioritizing one item from the small marginal difference. The separate corpus retained 163 books and 49,567 body tokens. Median within-book lexical diversity decreased by 0.0495 after body delimitation, and 40% of the raw-text highest-quartile selections changed. Documentary needs supported operational guidance, annotated models, child-directed language, and cultural interpretation. The resulting textbook specification connects character decisions with plot progression through planning, drafting, revision, and editing. These findings support an integrated development priority and transparent model selection; they do not demonstrate improved writing performance. Missing participant records, sampling information, and original ethics documentation constrain inference and require resolution before submission.