Fine print : a pilot test to promote local literature among secondary school students

Abstract

Fine Print is a pilot campaign initiated by four students from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. This campaign was conceived in response to the National Literary Reading and Writing Survey in 2015, revealing that 3 in 4 teenage readers had not read a local book in the past year. Among the teenagers surveyed (n=87), 43.5% had negative perceptions of local literary works in Singapore. Fine Print is a youth-centric pilot campaign aimed at Singaporean teenagers aged 12 to 17. We aimed to improve their perceptions of local literature and to encourage them to engage with local literary works. The pilot sought to achieve these goals through incorporating social media and interactive games to make local literature fun and relevant for our target audience. Email interviews were conducted with key stakeholders to gather preliminary insights on the local literary scene. Guided by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991), focus group discussions and pre-campaign surveys were administered to understand the target audience’s attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control towards local literature. The surveys also shed light on existing barriers to engaging with local literature. Research findings were used to craft the campaign message, and narrative persuasion (Flynn, 2015) was employed to guide the campaign tactics. Both online and offline tactics were utilised to engage the target audience. Post-test surveys were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. Finally, this paper will address the limitations of the pilot and plans for future consideration.