‘Ecopoetry’ as a basic part of reading learning

Submitted by: DAN LIU
Abstract: ‘Ecopoetry’ as a basic part of reading learning

From baby talk to social language, children need to go through a laborious process of reading learning (from implicit learning to explicit learning) through epilinguistic steps (Gombert, 1992). However, according to PIRLS and PISA surveys, not all children succeed in stepping into reading. We wonder whether there exists a complementary way or a special reading environment when formal reading in school fades or even fail under certain circumstances.
Poetry, especially modern poetry, seems to offer us a way out by bridging pupils’ emotion and imagination up to their reflexivity towards language. This ecological environment of reading learning through poetry called “ecopoetry” in our paper may assume this complementary role together with teacher’s proper guidance. This study targets those non-enhanced students who suffer from spelling problems, the lack of self confidence or merely the indifference towards language; moreover, it also aims at those normal ones by stimulating and deepening their reflexivity towards language through poetry, therefore improving their reading levels.
To partly solve this problem, we adopt the qualitative method (semi-conductive interviews) to collect our data in French elementary schools, followed by the content analysis to our case studies: six pupils (5-8 years old) from distinguished reading phases, together with their teachers were interviewed from 2015 to 2016. This two-year interview demonstrated us the psychological, imaginative, emotional and linguistic nurture of poetry. It revealed us how poetry could be practiced in class under appropriate professional gestures from adults and how the “ecopoetry” (see more in Favriaud 2017) contributes to refine a new definition of reading. We wonder 1) what relations pupils from 5 to 8 years old could weave in reading through their establishment of ecopoetry in different contexts (including school, family, class etc.) and 2) to what extent the construction of ecopoetry could help children to deal with distinctive relations during reading? Our research has offered us a preliminary answer to these questions, that is, poetry performs distinctive roles in different reading stages with children's distinctive “ecopoetry”. Meanwhile, the establishment of ecopoetry evolves with the growing age of children.

Key words: ecopoetry, reading, poetry, pupils



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