Reframing Thematic Interpretation to Support Students' Literary Reading

• In Event: 58.027 - Reading Literature—Reading Worlds: The Equity Opportunity

Abstract

This paper takes up the symposium’s focus on literary theory, shifts in epistemology, and teachable heuristics, especially as they relate to students deemed “struggling” readers. This paper describes a study of an interpretive heuristic designed to support students in the process of thematic interpretation.

The study is based on the premise that contemporary approaches to theme and thematic interpretation remain influenced by long-standing, class-based theories that frame theme as fixed and inscribed in the text, as “lessons” that teach moralistic truths, or as New Critical puzzles (Applebee, 1974; Graff, 2008; Hamel, 2003; Olson, Land, Anselmi, & AuBuchon, 2010; Squire, 1964).
In each of these frames, thematic interpretation is unconnected to personal meaning-making, perspective-taking, or “wrestling with complexity” – reading experiences that may be unique to literary texts (Keen, 2006; Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009).
These frames are especially damaging for students in under-resourced schools or lower-tracked classes, whose teachers are already more likely to favor known-answer questions over wide-ranging interpretive discussions (Oakes, 2005; Watanabe, 2008) and who themselves may be “weak” readers who tend to read for literal meaning (Graves & Frederiksen, 1996; Janssen et al, 2012).
This quasi-experimental study hypothesized that students would be more likely to engage in thematic interpretation if they were prompted with sentence stems that reframed traditional conceptions of theme. I designed sentence stems based on theories that highlight the role of emotion and judgment in literary reading (Booth, 1983; Danticat & Díaz, 2007), as well as theories of literary texts as worlds to explore and reflect upon (Bruner, 1991; Morrison, 2007; Shklovsky, 1991). I also drew on cognitive research that has found emotion and immersion in textual worlds to be interdependent (Gerrig, 1993; Green & Brock, 2002; Semino, 1995).
Urban and suburban high school students (N = 185) in high- and medium-poverty schools and low and high tracks read a richly symbolic and multi-valenced short story. They used one of several sentence stems in responding to the text. The control condition’s stem reads, “Some of my interpretations of themes in this story are _____.” The “text-world” condition prompts, “Reading this story helps us see that the world can be a place where ____.” The third condition prompted students to consider authorial attitudes about life.
Results showed that students in the experimental groups were significantly more likely to construct interpretive thematic statements as opposed to summary. Further, students who used the authorial attitude stem attended more often to the complex interplay between the text’s positive and negative emotional effects.
It may not be surprising that when prompted with interpretive language, students tended to construct more interpretations. What is surprising is that such a significant change resulted from such a small intervention. These results suggest that many lower-track and “struggling readers” may be more ready for interpretive reading than their teachers might realize. The results also shed light on the important role that literary theory and cognitive research can play in supporting equity in classroom practice.

Author

• Sarah Levine, Stanford University