Study On The Experience Of Teenager’s Media Literacy Education In Britain

Teenagers are the future and hope of a nation. With the development oftelevisions, networks, mobile phones, and other mass media, the rise of mass mediaand popular, the youth have been living in information era since they were born andthere is a easy way for them to get access to all kinds of media. Youngsters get toknow the society they live in through media every day. In this way, media have ahuge impact on how they analyze the information and how to distinguish whether it istrue or false. When facing the innumerous information flows, adolescents, in a sense,belong to the disadvantaged. They obtain a sense of curiosity and eager to knoweverything around them, but they lack the ability of self control and are weak intelling right or wrong, which makes them are easily affected by the negativeinformation. Therefore, finding an effective way to improve young people’s medialiteracy has become a realistic problem that needed to be solved urgently.In1994, the media literacy education was formally introduced to China,compared with developed countries like Britain, Canada and America, researches andpractice of media literacy education in China starts relatively later and the pace ofdevelopment is rather slow. Among the above western countries, Britain was the firstone to have been launching media literacy education for more than80years since1933. During such a long time, British experts gradually formed a set of perfectteenagers’ media literacy education system, which represents the advancedinternational youth media literacy education.This paper begins with the development process of teenagers’ media literacyeducation in the UK. Then, try to conclude the constructive suggestions on China’syouth media literacy education by analyzing all the latest materials and first-handinformation collected from the web, the British government official website and everyprofessional media literacy education website and integrating related books anddocumentaries, expecting to learn some successful experience of teenagers’ medialiteracy education in Britain. Combing the whole development process of British media literacy educationconsists the second part of this thesis. The four phases are "defense of mass media","appreciation of mass culture","decryption ideology" and "beyond protectionism".The third part is the analysis of the structure of British teenagers’ media literacyeducation which includes four aspects: the school is the core of teenagers’ medialiteracy education in the UK, the government is the pillar of teenagers’ media literacyeducation in the UK, the society is an important part in teenagers’ media literacyeducation in the UK, the family is the supplementary part in teenagers’ media literacyeducation in the UK. Based on the analysis, the fourth part of the paper comes to thesummary of the characteristics of youth media literacy education in the UK. Thesuccess of Britain’s youth media literacy education is ascribed to the government’ssupport, unified and flexible design of school curriculum, various training methodsfor teachers and attention paid by the teachers of the development of young people’ssubjective initiative. At last, some methods and suggestions on how to develop ourcountry teenagers’ media literacy education is putted forward. The author firmlybelieve that China can learn the successful experience from Britain and set up asystem which is under the guidance of the government, and schools, society andfamilies ought to participate in the system. By doing like this, we can find out anationalization and localization way that fit for China to launch teenagers’ medialiteracy education.