The construction of readers of literature by school
Submitted by:
Bernard Schneuwly
Abstract:
One main purpose of school is to allow students to read literary texts in a “literary” way. What this means is heterogeneous (see for instance the classification by Janssen & Rijlarsdam, 2006). In our study, we try to understand the genesis of the construction of the capacity to read literary texts in a literary way, to look how students are “disciplined” (Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 2014), are introduced in a school “discipline”. At the same time we were interested to see what “to read in a literary way” means in real teaching practices. To give elements of answer to this general question we videotaped 10 teachers of three school levels ((primary – 11 years old; secondary I – 14 years old; secondary II – 17 years old) studying two maximally contrasted texts (a most known and studied fable by La Fontaine; a contemporary short story by a Swiss author never studied yet in school; Gabathuler & Ronveaux, 2016): 60 teaching sequences of 1 to 4 lessons.
We will present the results of three of thirteen analyses conducted on the data.
1. The role and place of questionnaires in teaching literature
2. The emotional reactions of teachers and students
3. The finishing of the teaching sequences
The analyses show a complex pattern, each showing a different, complementary aspect of the process of “disciplinarisation” by school. Questionnaires play a different role in function of levels, but include from the beginning on aspects of text interpretation; difference between texts is marginal. The emotional reactions differ profoundly in function of the texts, differences between school levels being less important. Finishing a text is different from the point of view of text as of level.
This allows more generally to say: constructing the capacity of reading a literary text in a literary way begins very in primary school and leads to a quite high level of autonomous reading. The nature of text influences heavily what “reading in a literary text” means in opening more or less possibilities of the reader to interpret the text, independently of school level.
References:
Gabathuler, C., & Ronveaux, C. (2016). La généricité au travail dans la lecture de textes littéraires. In G. Sales Cordeiro & D. Vrydaghs (Ed.), Statuts des genres en didactique du français (pp. 173-191)
Hofstetter, R., & Schneuwly, B. (2014). Disciplinarisation et disciplination consubstantiellement liées. Deux exemples prototypiques sous la loupe: Les sciences de l'éducation et les didactiques des disciplines. In B. Engler (Ed.), Disziplin - discipline (pp. 27-46). Fribourg: Academic Press.
Janssen, G., & Rijlaarsman, G. (2006, april). Describing the Dutch literature curriculum : a theoretical and empirical approach. Paper presented at the Council of Europe conference “Towards a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages of School Education?” Kraków, Poland, April 27-29, 2006