Critical Reading in Everyday Life

Please look at this website on an online story, with animation and narration on the Little Red Riding Hood, a story that we are all so familiar with.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-red-riding-hood.htm

Coding
The text is accompanied by animation and audio narration. Based on the audio narration and the text, there is an aim to help children make phoneme and word recognition. In addition, there is also reading from left-to-right directionality. This is probably to teach children literacy skills.

Semantic
The role of this text participant is to follow the words as the narrator reads. Fairy tales is probably one of the first genres of text that children are in contact with at a young age. The idea of reading fairy tales is to expose children to stories and non-fiction texts. I would suggest that this text be catered to children aged around 4 who are learning to read. They would most probably have already heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood. By using a familiar text, children can just follow the narration and pictures to help decode words. It may even be possible that the writer is trying to introduce adjectives as we can see from the usage of “nice cake”, “big ears”, “big eyes” and “loud scream”.

Pragmatic
Fairy tales is a non-fiction text, falling under the text type category of narratives. One of the first few text types that are taught in school is writing a narrative. By exposing children to such stories, the concept of narratives is being internalized and hopefully children will be able to apply it when they have started writing.

Critical Competence
Mention the title, “Little Red Riding Hood” to any child and ask the child the gender of the little red riding hood. Chances are, the child would say that it is a female. In my opinion, the child is unconsciously cognitively thinking of the words “little” and “red” which would tend to be associated with girls, rather than boys. Looking at the pictures, the woodcutter is a male. A woodcutter, the hero who saves the day, does manual work and requires strength to chop the trees. Therefore, typically, a male would be more suitable for such a masculine role. The villain although is a wolf in this story, the voice that is given to the wolf is clearly a male’s voice.
On the other hand, Little Red Riding Hood is placed in the position whereby she listens to her mother to deliver the basket of food over. She is portrayed as being obedient, expected from daughters. She then meets the wolf and does not suspect anything amiss when she observed that her grandmother did not look like her grandmother! Instead, she asked questions. In this way, again, females are portrayed as being gullible. Little Red Riding Hood’s mother was also clothed in apron, depicting that mothers are homemakers. Finally, the clothes worn by the woodcutter is blue, whereas the grandmother is in pink. This is again a stereotypical expectation that blue is for males and pink for females.

Critical reading skills in Secondary 2
In this scenario, I will not use this source for critical reading skills. I would select the Little Red Riding Hood text, fully written and ask students to draw the characters. I would then ask them the following questions.
· Why did you choose these colours?
· Why did you choose to draw the clothes in this manner?
· Is it possible that the woodcutter is female?
· Would it change your impression of the story if the roles are reversed – the females are the woodcutter and wolf, while the males are the grandmother, little red riding hood and her father.