Helping High School Students Read Like Experts: Affective Evaluation, Salience, and Literary Interpretation, Cognition and Instruction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Struggling readers may find literary interpretation challenging due to a lack of sensitivity to the full range of literary forms and norms noticed more routinely by experienced readers. In previous work, we demonstrated the effectiveness of a month-long affect-based instructional intervention designed to help struggling high school readers develop richer interpretations of literary texts (Levine 2014; Levine & Horton, 2013). The current study explored whether instruction in affective evaluation helped these high school students attend to textual details in ways that are similar to expert readers. We compared pre- and post- intervention think-aloud protocols of five high school students with those of five experienced English teachers as they read and responded to a short story. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that after the intervention, novice readers attended more frequently to story details that expert readers found salient to interpretation, and also made interpretive moves similar to those made by experts, such as inferences about character goals, interpretation of potential symbols, and, to some degree, attention to patterns and juxtapositions in the text. Further, this focus on interpretively salient details influenced the nature of students’ thematic inferences. These findings suggest that the recruitment of everyday, affect-based practices can help novice readers develop more “expert-like” literary schemata and construct more meaningful interpretations of a literary text.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2015 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Levine, Sarah |
|---|---|
| Author | Horton, William |
Subjects
| Subject | Literature-based instruction |
|---|---|
| Subject | struggling readers |
| Subject | high school |
| Subject | affect |
| Subject | cognitive strategies |
| Subject | literary interpretation |
| Subject | high school |
| Genre | Article |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Sarah Levine & William Horton (2015) Helping High School Students Read Like Experts: Affective Evaluation, Salience, and Literary Interpretation, Cognition and Instruction, 33:2, 125-153, DOI: 10.1080/07370008.2015.1029609
Collection
Graduate School of Education Open Archive
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- Contact
- srlevine@stanford.edu
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