Intertextuality or Story Resistance? A Deconstruction of Stories with Preschoolers: An Example of "The Little Red Riding Hood"

Storybook reading experiences have the potential to foster children’s cognitive skills in regard to sequencing a story plot, making predictions about the outcome, comprehending the story’s message, and understanding cause-and-effect relationships. Deconstruction enables children to think critically about the story’s protagonist’s perspectives, themes, and messages. Thus, deconstruction can be a useful method for examining a story’s elements with children and triggering them to make intertextual connections among stories. This study focuses on preschoolers’ intertextual connection competencies and provides them with a novel activity. Therefore, the study focused on a well-known fairytale titled “The Little Red Riding Hood” along with two different, newer versions of the story. The present study’s participants included thirty preschool children (fifteen girls and fifteen boys). The following three versions of the “Red Riding Hood” stories were read twice during the small group reading activity: “The Little Red Riding Hood,” “Very Little Red Riding Hood” (written by Teresa Heapy, illustrated by Sue Heap), and “Who is Afraid of Red Riding Hood?” (written by Sara Şahinkanat, illustrated by Ayşe İnan Alican). The stories present different perspectives and contradictory messages regarding the same topic. The findings revealed that the children talked about intertextual linkage between story plots wherein they focused on the climaxes as dissimilar and similar points. The study findings show that half of the children retold their stories along the same lines as those in the previous stories. On the other hand, eleven children drew intertextual connections in their stories and combined different characters, plots, and/or settings from the three versions. Deconstruction can be a fruitful teaching method with which early childhood teachers may encourage children to assert perspectives, think critically, and make intertextual connections among stories to foster their story comprehension.