How Students Make Meaning from Literary Text

JURNAL TAHURI

The works of literature greatly contribute to a nation's characteristics and personality. Understanding a literary work means being able to grasp moral values ​​or messages that are useful for social life. However, understanding a literary text is not as easy as understanding a non-literary text. The main reason is that the literary text bound to several forming conventions such as the language convention, literature, and cultural conventions. To understand this, students must be trained through education and teaching. Literary learning which can produce a good understanding should prioritize the process to familiarize students with the conventions that bind literary works through heuristic and hermeneutic reading. The 2013 curriculum, requires a change in the paradigm of the teacher's thinking towards planning and implementing learning based on a scientific approach. The important point that should be understood by the teachers is literary learning, according to any curricu...

Journal of Reading Behavior, 1991

This study compared remedial readers to more proficient readers in their meaning-making processes during the reading of literary text. Six children attending a university-based Literacy Center read aloud two stories and verbalized their thoughts during reading. Langer's categories (1990) were used to compare the resulting think alouds. Langer found readers assume four stances as they make meaning while reading literature: (a) being out and stepping into an envisionment, (b) being in and moving through an envisionment, (c) stepping back and rethinking what one knows, and (d) stepping out and objectifying the experience. Langer described readers as always working toward an evolving understanding of the whole, and their envisionment of the whole affects their momentary understandings. A qualitative analysis was also conducted as other categories emerged and all the responses were recategorized for difficulties experienced by remedial readers. Analysis revealed that the remedial rea...

Many literary critics have also asked the question, “Does meaning reside in the author, the text, or the reader” (Richter, 2000, p.12) and what is the nature of literary experience (Langer, 1995, p. 24). As literary critics continue their litanies of pedagogical problems and critiques associated with the author, the text, and the reader (inherent in New Criticism and the flaws in New Critical practices) nowhere is the impact felt more than on the reader just because when two elephants are fighting, it is the grass that suffers.

1990

Purcell-Gates, Victoria On the Outside Looking In: A Study of Remedial Readers' Meaning-Making while Reading Literature. Report Series 6.2. Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature.

1989

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average for their grade level, produced chink-aloud protocols as they read Lido short stories, two poems, a science text, and a social studies text. The think-aloud protocols were analyzed and a set of patterns of student concerns were identified. Results indicated that the process of reading literary and non-literary texts is one that involves a four broad recursive stances that the reader takes toward the text: (1) being out and stepping into an envisionment; (2) being in and moving through an envisionment; (3) stepping back and rethinking what one knows; and (4) stepping out and objectifying the experience. (Fifty-three references and a selection from one student's think-aloud protocol are attached.) (RS)

English in Education, 2020

This article introduces the activity of student-written reading logs as a practical application of reader-response theory in EFL literature teaching. Since reader-response theory stresses the synthesis between reader and text, so it is proposed that practical applications should be based on this interaction. Students make notes in their reading logs as they read a novel, setting down their thoughts and feelings. This encourages them to interact with the text, and to tap into their individual responses to the literature. While reading logs are already used in L1 literature teaching, this article argues that the activity is particularly appropriate for L2 use, since it stimulates foreign language readers to go beyond the first barrier of semantic understanding and to move towards critical appreciation. The article describes how reading logs were successfully used in literature classes at a junior college in Taiwan.

ILE, 2007

This research was developed from a previous CELT project (2003/04 Focussed seminar groups, Clarke, 2004) in which students were asked to read a specific article and then discuss it in a seminar situation. It was noted was that students approached reading in ...

1991

A naturalistic case study, involving a 2-year collaboration between 14 classroom teachers and eight university researchers studying 250 middle and high school students, examined the types of principles underlying effective literature instruction that emphasizes the development of students' reasoning abilities in the context of their understanding of literature. Case study methodology was used, tracing, across one entire school year, the interactions among the participants (teachers and students), the instructional content (the expectations, activities, artifacts, and attitudes), and the ways in which students reacted to and interpreted classroom activities. Findings indicated a number of characteristics common to classrooms which expected the active thought and participation of each student, including: envisionment-buildinq through discussion and writing; a primary instructional focus on the exploration of possibilities rather than maintaining a point of reference; social contexts which taught students ways to discuss and ways to think about literature; and small group activities in which students could use their new knowledge and strategies on their own. Findings also indicated six principles of instru:tion that seem to underlie such classrooms: (1) students as active makers of meaning; (2) literature reading as question-generating; (3) student knowledge taps (teachers' questions about content focusing on what the students understood about that content, with no predetermined right answer); (4) class meetings as time to develop understandings; (5) instruction as scaffolding the process of understanding; and (6) transfer of control from teacher to student. (Three tables are included; 76 references and four appendizes are attached.) (SR)