Abstract #1596

Abstract: Dealing with poetic texts is an important part of literature education. The ways students deal with metaphors not only influence their level of understanding poetic texts in general, but also their perception of text structures. Our approach to metaphor is based on interaction theory of metaphor (Christmann & Scheele, 2001; Eco, 1984). Therefore, the student-based substudy associated with the research project Literary Understanding and Metaphor (LiMet) focusses on the following questions:
- Which procedures of dealing with metaphors can be reconstructed in different age groups/grades?
- Are there specific strategies related to different levels of understanding and/or are there equally adequate but different ways of accessing metaphorical understanding?
- Is it possible to compare ways of interpretation across different poetic texts? In which way could the text’s structure and the metaphor’s demands be described in detail?
- Is there a possibility to connect strategies and learner profiles so that they also include attitudes towards literature and specific experiences of dealing with literature in school?
The study is based on three German poems that were presented to ninth- and sixth-grade-students (“Gymnasium” [higher academic track] and middle schools). We adopted the think aloud method to the aims of our study. Students were asked to think aloud while reading the poems in four steps: 1) presented in small parts, 2) presented as entire text, 3) with a focus on three or four metaphors and 4) with a focus on global coherence.
The collected data are analysed by using a coding system that was first presented by Pieper/Wieser (2012) and is now further developed to describe different operations of dealing with metaphors. To reconstruct strategies of understanding, we also select some cases by coding and then analyse them by using sequential analysis.
In the paper presentation, we present the coding system and first results of the analysis including strategies of understanding metaphors.
The paper is part of the project Literary Understanding and Metaphor (LiMet), funded by the German Research Foundation (WI 4237/2-1), TU Dresden and University of Hildesheim/Germany, Dorothee Wieser, Irene Pieper, Marie Lessing-Sattari, Bianca Strutz.
Christmann, U., & Scheele, B. (2001). Kognitive Konstruktivität am Beispiel Ironie und Metapher [Cognitive constructivity. The case of irony and metaphor]. In Groeben, N. (Ed.), Zur Programmatik einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Psychologie. Bd. 2: Objektwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. 1. Halbband: Sozialität, Geschlechtlichkeit, Erlebnisqualitäten, kognitive Konstruktivität (pp. 261-326). Münster: Aschendorff.
Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pieper, Irene / Wieser, Dorothee (2012): Understanding Metaphors in poetic Texts: Towards a Determination of interpretative Operations in Secondary School Students’ Engagement with Imagery. (Special issue guest edited by Irene Pieper & Tanja Janssen). L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, S. 1-26.
Keywords: understanding metaphor, strategies, think aloud, sequential analysis, coding system

Students’ strategies of understanding metaphors