Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to present a structural pedagogical analysis for assessing what age group of children each fairy tale is appropriate for and what needs of children it can meet.

The article starts with the definition of fairy tales given by V. Anikin, which helps us to understand why this genre attracts so much attention. Then, various approaches to exegesis and studying fairy tales are discussed. As the first one, based on the opinions of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmond Freud and his colleague Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung explanation of the phenomenon of fairy tales from the psychoanalytic viewpoint is given.

The psychological approach to studying fairy tales also draws from psychoanalytic experience of relating fairy tales to human unconscious. Scientific works of many psychologists underscore that children’s perception of fairy tales most importantly occurs at subconscious level.

In most of the works representing a pedagogical approach to studying fairy tales one can read about their importance in inculcating such moral qualities as fairness, diligence, love of life and hope for the best.

Describing structural method we focus on the works by Vladimir Propp (about fairy tales in general) and Meletinsky (about animal tales).

A significant part of this research is devoted to choosing fairy tales for pedagogical purposes – for beneficial influence on children’s behavior. In this work we use the term pedagogical purposes to denote a set of planned outcomes of pedagogical activities in the form of new beliefs and skills acquired by students or a new type of behavior students demonstrate. Accordingly, fairy tales can be viewed as the content of the teaching material. As the subject of this work is animal tales, ten English and ten Russian folk animal tales were analyzed from structural and pedagogical viewpoints.

The outcomes of the structural pedagogical analysis show that only three out of 20 animal stories analyzed within this research have full morphological structure typical for classical (magic) fairy tales. However, each of the 20 stories teaches some moral value, which is never said directly. The possibility of designating the level of complexity of the structure of a fairy tale and the type of moral value taught by it makes it easy to define what kind of children (their age and behavioral needs are meant) the fairy tale is beneficial for.

Keywords:

Structural and pedagogical analysis, morphological structure, animal tales.