Text comprehension in the classroom setting: On high school and higher education students’ reading and comprehending of poetry and prose

Submitted by: Corina I.A. Breukink
Abstract: In Dutch high school programmes, the importance of expository reading is strongly emphasized. In contrast, the teaching of literary reading is absent or neglected, especially when poetry reading is concerned. The final attainment level for literature involves the ability to read, comprehend, interpret and evaluate relatively complex literary texts. ‘Relatively complex’ implies that these texts are characterized by ambiguity, which urges a reader to make inferences in order to be able to comprehend what is being read. In Dutch teacher education programmes for high schools, literary competence is a domain within the current Knowledge Bases, which are established and followed by all Dutch universities of applied sciences. Students in undergraduate and graduate teacher training programmes are educated in ‘dominant’ literary theoretic models to analyze and interpret poetic texts. At graduate level students learn how to critically consider the usefulness of these theoretical models in high school. With lack of effective didactic interventions, how to read and understand poetry, poetry is generally hardly taught. Simultaneously, empirical reading research aims at an augmented understanding of what literary reading is and how it actually works in learning environments. Thus, the scientific need meets with the problems that teachers experience when teaching literature, and particularly poetry. Previous reading research examined readers’ literary reading activities, their responses and reading processes, but is mostly restricted to the reading of short literary narratives (Janssen et al. 2012). Few studies were focussed on comparing reading expository texts and literary narratives or reading for information and reading esthetically (Frederking et al. 2012). The few previous studies that were aimed at poetry reading by adolescent readers, showed that they experienced problems in comprehending poetic texts beyond the literal meaning, which negatively effected their appreciation of poetry (Eva-Wood, 2004; Peskin, 1998; Peskin 2007; Peskin 2010). In this study we investigated to what extent adolescent poetry readers, that is thirty 9th, twenty-nine 11th graders and twenty-two freshmen at a university of applied sciences, read and comprehended poetry in comparison to prose. Comprehending a text is a complex and largely unconscious cognitive process in which a reader has to engage actively (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). In his model for text comprehension processes, Kintsch distinghuishes three levels of text comprehension: The situation model represents the deepest reading experience, in which the reader connects the textual information with his own world knowledge, experiences and soforth. In relation to expository texts, it is assumed that readers develop the same situation model, in order to extract the same meaning. In poems, that are defined by a high ambiguity and few cues in comparison with expository texts and literary narratives, it is hypothesized that multiple situation models are constructed. In this study, each participant performed 6-8 reading comprehension tasks in a prose and poetry condition: two short expository texts, two short literary narratives and four poems. After each text, participants answered 3-4 comprehensive questions. Firstly, statistical analysis shows that there are no significant differences between the mean comprehension scores for prose and poetry. An interaction effect between classes and genres is not significant. Secondly, on all three classes, the difference between prose and poetry is significant. Furthermore, the stimulated-recall data from stronger and weaker poetry readers indicate that stronger readers undertake more reading and answering activities. In contrast, weaker readers appear to be less active readers: only after reading the comprehensive questions, they are prompted to look beyond the surface or text base level and formulate more elaborated answers in the direction of a situation model. In the context of this study, several points of discussion could be mentioned. Most critical is the internal validity in relation to the selected texts and the comprehensive questions in the reading test. There is no guarantee that the combination of text and comprehensive questions elicits comprehension at the situation model level. Another point of discussion is the method to select weaker, average and stronger readers for the retrospective interviews. For example, the determination of the reading comprehension level of the first year’s students was derived from the reading comprehension test in this study. Although this test contains a variety of texts, genres and questions, there is no guarantee that the results of a single reading comprehension test is sufficient enough to distinguish between the three reading levels.
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