What a beautiful phrase, too bad it’s not in rhyme
Submitted by:
Hans Das
Abstract:
Most L1-teachers would agree that poetry is an important part of literary education. It provides them with an opportunity for their students to gain insight in the way poets perceive the world around them. It also is a chance of introducing students to often ambiguous, complex and condensed language.
However, a survey among 225 L1-teachers in secondary education in the Netherlands (Vekobo project, s.d.) shows that there is dissatisfaction about the curriculum structure. Moreover, only few teachers feel they are capable of dealing with the differences in lyrical proficiency.
This could hardly surprising given that poetry in education still remains an almost undeveloped field of research. In this research I focus on the perspective of how students in secondary education read, interpret and appreciate poetry. There are two main research questions: What levels of students’ lyrical abilities do expert-teachers distinguish? And: How do students in secondary education read and understand poetry and what are their preferences?
The starting point for my research are two studies which focus on how students read literary prose. In the first one Witte (2012) described levels of development for reading and understanding literature. Janssen et al (2006) researched the reading activities applied by strong and weak readers of short stories. I would like to extend these theories to poetry.
During the first stage of this research, I worked with two focus groups (5 and 6 teachers). I described the levels of the students' lyrical abilities, based on the pedagogical content knowledge of expert teachers. The teachers assumed there are five levels for students from lower and four for students from upper secondary education. These teachers also distinguished what sorts of poems are representative and indicative for each level.
In the second stage, which I just started, the students’ preferences and the strategies they use to interpret poetry are examined by means of interviews and thinking aloud protocols. These results will be validated (spring 2018) by a survey among a random group of students (N=1000) from several schools all over the country.
If possible, the results of the stages will be combined by developing a frame of reference in which the characteristics of the readers and the features of the texts will be described in relation to each other, so teachers will be able to take the differences between students into account and to improve the curriculum of their poetry education.
References:
Janssen, T., Braaksma, M & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2006). Literary reading activities of good and weak students: A think aloud study. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 21(1), 35-52
Vekobo project (s.d.). Legitimacy, status and practical problems of teaching poetry in secondary education in the Netherlands. Groningen: Teacher Education Centre RUG (to be published).
Witte, T., Rijlaarsdam, G., & Schram, D. (2012). An empirically grounded theory of literary development: Teachers' pedagogical content knowledge on literary development in upper secondary education. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 1-30
research area:
poetry in secondary education
key words:
poetry, lower and upper secondary education, levels of development, focus groups, interviews and thinking aloud