Language teaching and fairytales: contextualized teaching, a new approach

Abstract

How can we instigate the child’s imagination in favor of language teaching?  Egan (1992) appoints an approach to teaching children that differs from the common, barely ‘imaginative’. This approach brings the child’s imagination to the center of the curriculum. ‘Teaching with context’ (using fairytales) can be linked to Bakhtin’s genres, they are present in our everyday life and are impossible to separate from language learning. Two versions of two fairy tale stories were chosen to be linguistically compared, for the matter of investigating what versions are considered proper in a classroom context. The stories analyzed are Snow White and Cinderella, one version translated from German and the modern adaptation.