Language Τeaching and Multiliteracies in Primary Education: "Once Upon a Time when Advertising Met Fairy Tales and the Classics of Children's Literature"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26248/edusci.v2023i4.1809Keywords:
Advertisement, fairy tale, classic children’s literature, literacies, curricula, creative writing, primary educationAbstract
Aiming to generate positive feelings in a diverse audience, including child and adult viewers, commercials capitalise the common cultural capital of fairy tales and classic children’s literature, inscribed in the collective imaginary, with the ultimate goal of promoting a product. Advertisements as a type of multimodal text and as a product of mass culture which can contribute towards teaching multiliteracies is one textual type that primary school students are called to study and produce. However, multimodality of advertisements was exhausted in just linking textual and visual modalities in the 2003 curriculum on language and literature; the complementary 2011/2014 curriculum, notwithstanding its explicit references to multiliteracies, did not provide teachers with the material and methodology which could contribute towards the effective teaching of advertisement. The recently drawn curriculum (2021), which is orientated towards the pedagogy of multiliteracies, offers a more consistent proposition for the approach of commercials as argumentative texts. Yet, it is still applied to textbooks written some twenty years ago, based on other canonical texts. Drawing on advertising material derived from the web and the TV, this study focuses on the promotion of multiliteracies, as well as of creative writing, exemplifying its case through adverts which subject the fairy tale and classic children’s literature to a productive adaptation and render it a tool for the promotion of critical literacy amongst students.