Activity Ideas: Using fairy tales to teach key literary techniques and concepts

A teaching resource created by the HEA English Subject Centre.

It can be helpful to introduce students to complex and subtle aspects of literary technique in an preliminary way before they encounter these techniques within the multi-layered world of the texts and writers they are studying. Concepts such as voice in narrative for example free indirect style unreliability and the intrusive narrator or structural techniques such as framing devices can be introduced using a very short relatively simple and well-known text such as a fairytale to consolidate understanding early on.