Intertextuality and Literary Education in Childhood
Intertextuality: The Reader’s Role
Intertextuality is a component of literary competence that provides discursive linkages between texts. It integrates into the degrees of textual assimilation and forms of perception of each reader (personal, academic, critical). It also encourages active participation in the text and fosters personal aesthetics as activation. The reader is important in intertextuality because they survey and promote partnerships between formal textual elements and cultural discussions. The growth of its functionality is used to guide the reader’s training toward significant knowledge of literature.
Objectives of Literary Education
- Present literature as an avenue for understanding the world to broaden experience and sensitivity, and to socialize the individual.
- Introduce the environment and cultural tradition that literature provides through contact with social and cultural diversity.
- Demonstrate that literary knowledge fosters children’s expressive power. Literature is an excellent opportunity to initiate this because linguistic forms have many possibilities for structuring and restructuring language resources.
- Approach reading as an understanding of artistic codes and educate in aesthetic pleasure.
- Provide an image of literature as a testimony to the education of human thought.
Reading and Language Skills
Literary reading is more complex than usual reading due to its aesthetic component. It requires a reader and creator to interpret it. Reading a literary text involves a double interpretation: the interpreter has to defy the existing code and launch interpretive hypotheses that function as forms of new coding attempts. It is a complex text that allows for the construction of meaning.
In addition to being an end in itself, literary reading is a valuable instrument for developing linguistic skills. It expands verbal skills, encourages reading, and activates interpretive skills due to the fascination with extraordinary times, spaces, and characters. It provides textual structure models with the power of attraction for the written word. It fosters creativity and imagination because nothing is meaningless.
Literary reading enables playful and fun activities. Systematic and rigorous strategies move beyond the arbitrariness of the elements. It facilitates the recipient’s participation, transforming them into an active subject in the destiny of their own meanings. Each reader will enjoy the possibility of constructing their own meanings based on their interpretive skills. Each will draw their own conclusion.
Literary Canon in Children’s Literature
- Projects and maintains values, forms, structures, and cultural referents.
- Includes all genres (poetry, narrative) and peculiarities of speech.
- Assists in the formation of reading habits.
- Determination of the model reader: the list is based on the students, age, characteristics, etc.
- Enhance receptive cooperation to work on reception, meaning-making, interpretation, and reading skills.
- Identify the characteristics of literary discourse.
- Establish intertextual connections.
Criteria for Selection of Literary Texts
Choosing appropriate texts, whether classic, current, or national, is a difficult task. We need texts suitable for different educational contexts and the diversity of children. They should also contribute to the development of literary competence so that children experience pleasure in reading. Therefore, it is beneficial to have a class library to foster interest and the creation of reading habits. This is more positive if there is autonomy to choose texts and enjoy them.
It is advisable to remove the term “literary” as something sacred and mythical and to establish reading as an activity born of a human need that has its roots in imagination and is also an effort of interpretation and representation of self and reality. Although in early childhood education, students may not have the minimum literary competence to assess the linguistic elements of literature, it would be good to start the curriculum with an approach to literary texts, gradually progressing from texts with a lower literary level to the literary text itself.
Proposals for Literary Text Selection
- Progress from texts of lower literary level to higher levels, but always appropriate to the students’ language level.
- Progress from texts closer to the child’s culture to those with less proximity. Selection can also be made by subject, genre, or the literary text itself.