Constructing Meaning When Reading Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study

Abstract

This research w as sup ported by a N ational Acad em y of Ed ucation, Spencer Fellow ship. I w ould like to express special appreciation to Carl Bereiter and David Olson for helpful suggestions and critical com m ents. And I w ish to thank the stud ents at the University of Toronto and at Branksom e H all for their eager participation. Correspond ence concerning this article should be sent to Joan Peskin, OISE/ University of Toronto, Institute of Child Study, 45 Walm er Road , Toronto, Ontario, M5R 2X2.

The impact of literature education on students' perceptions of self and others: Exploring personal and social learning experiences in relation to teacher approach

“…Expert readers have, for example, a large variety of reading strategies at their disposal and are capable of regarding literary texts from multiple perspectives, as well as of analyzing them on various levels. Novice readers of literature, on the other hand, often mainly focus on the events in a story and regard a story from a single perspective (e.g., Andringa, 1990Andringa, , 1995Earthman, 1992;Peskin, 1998;Zeitz, 1994; for overviews also see Goldman, McCarthy & Burkett, 2015;Hanauer, 1999). These differences in literary reading processes suggest that the effects of literary reading on readers' selves and their social perceptions could differ as well: literary reading may affect expert adult readers and novice adolescent readers in different ways.…”

“…Research conducted in the context of the literature classroom among adolescents, on the other hand, has often been confined to reading engagement and/or analytical skills in terms of interpreting literary texts (e.g., Eva-Wood, 2004;Janssen, Braaksma & Couzijn, 2009;Peskin, 1998;Pieper & Wieser, 2012;Tengberg, Olin-Scheller & Lindholm, 2015). Although many of these studies incorporated the perspective of what readers bring to the text -in particular Eva-Wood (2004), who developed a thinkand-feel-aloud pedagogy -the perspective of what literary fiction might mean to adolescent readers and what they can take away from it for their (social) lives, remained largely unexplored.…”

Disciplinary Literacy in English as a Foreign Language in Biotechnology Engineering

“…On the other hand, the biotechnology experts rarely summarize the text in order to understand it better; this finding is in line with the finding of Chi's expert-novice research (2006), according to which experts perceive large, meaningful patterns in given information and have superior short-term and long-term memory. In the expert-novice studies in literary, historical, and science reading/writing, the following differences were recorded: in literary reading, novices lack disciplinary-specific interpretative strategies that the experts use to make coherent interpretations (Peskin, 1998); expert historians are engaged in the processes of acquiring information, sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration while the novices read the documents making no connections to the others (Wineburg, 1991); in science reading, the purpose for reading, background knowledge (Bazerman, 1985), and sourcing (Wineburg, 1991) are the factors that determine how the experts approach the text. In this study, using background knowledge is the strategy used frequently by both students (novices) and experts; with regard to the purpose for reading in EFL, there is also no difference between students (novices) and experts since both groups read in EFL most frequently for educational purposes.…”

“…A more empirical source comes from expert reader studies in various disciplines (Shanahan, Shanahan, & Misischia, 2011) drawing on the expert-novice paradigm from cognitive sciences, and identifying performance differences by using observations and think-aloud protocols. These studies revealed that disciplinary experts and novices differ in the way they read in their respective fields (Chi, 2006) and that disciplinary experts also differ among themselves with regard to reading (Bazerman, 1985;Peskin, 1998;Wineburg, 1991). The third source originates from functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), which is concerned with the functions of language -what and how language does in a particular social context.…”

Understanding metaphors in poetic texts: towards a determination of interpretative operations in secondary school students’ engagement with imagery

“…Nonetheless, the appli-cation of previous knowledge, including conventions of interpretation, needs further investigation. The existing expert-novice studies which have explored this question are only of limited help here, since the experts selected are usually scholars and academics in the field (see Peskin, 1998;Winkler, 2007).Our view is, however, that the divergent applications of previous literary knowledge by pupils deserves closer attention, in order to enable a critical comparison of different test subjects at a similar stage of cognitive development and with an (at least in part) similar literary socialisation in the classroom.…”