Making Interpretation Visible With an Affect-Based Strategy

• In Event: Expanding Pedagogical Understandings of Literary Reasoning and Argumentation in Middle and High Schools: Project READI

Abstract

Purpose
While a rich body of research examines the cognitive and affective processes by which we understand symbolism and other literary devices (Graesser, Olde, & Klettke, 2002; Mar & Oatley, 2008; Miall, 1988; Sadoski, Goetz, & Kangiser, 1988), the pedagogical implications of that research are largely unexplored.

High school readers – especially those with little experience in formal literary interpretation – struggle to move beyond literal readings of literary texts, and may therefore miss access to the potential cognitive, emotional, and social rewards of engaging with literary texts (Beach & Myers, 2001; Kermode, 2000; Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004).

This study recruited research on everyday schemata, affective evaluation, and metaphor processing to design an instructional intervention intended to support high school students’ literary reasoning and interpretive practices.

Theoretical Framework
This study builds on the “cognitive apprenticeship” framework (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991) and Lee’s Cultural Modeling Framework (1995, 2001, 2007), which focuses on identifying and making public everyday sense-making practices in order to support academic learning. In this case, a teacher helped “make interpretation visible” to high school students by explicit modeling of affect- and schema-based heuristics for constructing figurative interpretations in literary works.


Methods
An instructional intervention lasting four weeks was implemented in a 12th grade ELA class from an urban, ethnically diverse high school where 90% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. The teacher helped “make interpretation visible” by explicit modeling and students practiced an “affective evaluation” heuristic, in which they: 1) identified language in a literary text that they felt to be particularly affect-laden; 2) ascribed valence to that language (positive, negative, or both); and then 3) explained their evaluations.

Data include videotaped and transcribed pre- and post-study think-aloud protocols in response to a short story, given by students from an intervention (N = 5) and a comparison (N = 5) class. Student responses were coded by two independent raters as literal or interpretive, based on coding schemes from similar studies (Lehr, 1988; Svensson, 1987; Vipond & Hunt, 1984). In order to provide another measure of students’ development of interpretive practices, students’ selection of language salient to interpretation was compared to that of three experienced readers of literature. Two-way mixed ANOVAs and follow-up t-tests were used to analyze student responses in think-alouds. In addition, pre-post assessments were given to intervention and comparison classes.

Results
Results show that students receiving the intervention made gains in interpretive responses and were more aligned with experienced readers in their identification and interpretation of salient details. The results suggest that explicit instruction in affect-driven interpretive heuristics can support novice readers in constructing interpretive readings of literary texts.

Significance
This research contributes to a set of useful, accessible models for literary interpretation that honor and build on students’ everyday interpretive practices. The study builds on the tradition of recruiting research for “real world” use in order to support teachers and help move students towards independence in literary reasoning.

Author

• Sarah Levine, National Louis University