Poetic metaphor and classroom interaction: How does educational dialogue support students’ interpreting metaphor?
Submitted by:
Irene Pieper
Abstract:
Educational dialogue can be considered as an essential tool for supporting students’ learning in the various domains and subjects of formal schooling (Muhonen et al. 2017). The value of dialogic approaches to the teaching of literature has been stressed frequently in recent years. Several criteria for the quality of classroom dialogue have been developed and attention has been paid to the professional development of teachers in this respect (Reznitskaya 2012). The paper builds on these insights and reaches out to a specific aspect of literary education. It addresses metaphor interpretation as a challenge for learners in various stages of formal education (Pieper & Strutz 2018) and asks how this challenge is tackled in classroom discourse. Data consist of videotaped and transcribed lessons from four classes in lower secondary (grade 6 and 8; one each from higher academic track and lower academic track) and two classes in upper secondary (grade 10 and 12) in two German secondary schools (one with a higher academic track). The lessons dealt with the same three metaphorical poems. Via a sequential analysis of the talks (based on discourse analysis) the way teachers support students’ interpretative performance is explored. Special attention is paid to verbal interaction as a means of developing interpretative competencies that are (1) linked to linguistic means. Here, the notion of “text procedures” (Feilke 2014) is adapted to explore the link between lexical means and the concept of interpretation (here: interpreting metaphor). (2) The notion of an aesthetic stance that Louise Rosenblatt brought up is taken into account. Particularly the comparison between the different lower secondary classrooms show that the dialogic sequences vary considerably with respect to balancing students’ intuitive notions and more thorough encounters with the literary text. It is argued that the question of how the poem is established as a piece of art that is explored by the classroom community as well as the notion of a linguistic repertoire for interpretation deserve more attention. Both aspects should be considered as important means of building ground for more complex interpretative tasks in literature education.
Keywords: literary understanding, metaphor, poetry, classroom dialogue
References:
Feilke, H. (2014). Argumente für eine Didaktik der Textprozeduren. In: Bachmann, Th./Feilke, H. (ed.s), Werkzeuge des Schreibens. Beiträge zu einer Didaktik der Textprozeduren. Stuttgart: Fillibach, 11-34.
Muhonen, H. et al. (2018). Quality of educational dialogue and associatio with students_ academic performance. In: Learning and Instruction 55, 67-79.
Pieper, I. & Strutz, B. (2018). Learners’ approaches to poetic metaphor. A think aloud study with secondary students in grade 6 and 9. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 18, p. 1-35. https://doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2018.18.03.05.
Reznitskaya, A. (2012). Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Language Use during Literature Discussions. The Reading Teacher, 65, 446-456.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/TRTR.01066