Advertising and children: on the critical literacy of elementary schools' pupils

This work deals with the commercial communication, mainly its relation to audience of children. It investigates how Czech school children are able to perceive, receive, and evaluate the communitation with advertisements. The introductory section on the features of the advertisement consists of its definition, history, how it ranks within mass, or more precisely, commercial communication. lt investigates the trends in the current commercial discourse including the criticism of advertisements and the fact that the importance of children as a target group is increasing. The work overviews the legislative arrangements dealing with the impact of advertisements on child' s perception. Furthermore it focuses on children and their specific reception of advertisements which causes their defencelessness towards them, and summarizes American research on this topic. Our research itself focuses on single abilities which represent the ways for critical reception of commercial texts. We investigated the level of children' s ability to identify the advertisements. We tried to find a level of their knowledge of advertisements. In addition we explored their attitude to the purpose of advertisements in general and their ability to understand their texts and strategies. At the same time, we examined how the rate of this..